The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives deployed its national response team to Nederland Friday in the wake of the fire that destroyed a shopping center along the town’s main street.

The Caribou Village Shopping Center, home to an estimated 20 businesses in the small mountain town, was decimated by a structure fire that began at about 3:41 a.m. Thursday morning, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. The fire prompted an evacuation order issued for residents and businesses in the south and east portions of the town that lasted about five hours.

No injuries were reported in the incident but officials did not note a potential cause for the fire in the release.

In a social media announcement Friday, the ATF said that the national response team deploys to investigate “major fires, explosions and bombings alongside local partners.”

Boulder County officials said Friday that the team’s presence on the scene allows for local resources to be freed up for other purposes.

“When they bring in the national team, it avoids the use of local resources and draining them,” a spokesperson for the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said Friday. “They have an expertise in fire investigation. We’re lucky to have them.”

The shopping center has been a target of violence before. In 2016, authorities arrested 66-year-old David Ansberry for attempting to detonate a radio-controlled bomb in front of the Nederland Police Station, which was located in the shopping center before the building burned down on Thursday, according to a 2019 news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Colorado.

Evidence from prosecutors at that time revealed that Ansberry had placed a backpack at the foot of a police parking sign at the station containing a bomb inside, according to the release. He then called an attached telephone multiple times, but the bomb did not detonate.

The backpack ended up being brought inside the station by a police officer who did not know what was inside, the release says. Once they realized the pack contained an explosive device, the station and plaza were evacuated and the bomb was detonated in place using robots and an inert aluminum slug.

Ansberry had previously been a member of a counterculture group called “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace” that had been located near Nederland in the 1960s and 1970s, the release says. An STP sticker found at the scene of the attempted bombing had a handwritten note on it that read “RIP Deputy Dawg Murdered By Marshal 7/17/71,” a reference to former STP member Guy Gaughner who was murdered in Nederland in 1971.

A diary recovered from Ansberry contained entries referring to the death of Gaughner and saying “Poor Deputy. REVENGE is called for,” according to the release.

Investigators are still determining what caused Thursday’s fire. Anyone with information about the fire is asked to contact the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office tip line at BCSOtips@bouldercounty.gov or 303-441-3674.