A university vehicle caught fire near campus Monday morning, sending flames nearly 12 feet in the air and a trail of black smoke billowing from the scene.

And while the fire department is still unsure of the cause, a university employee believes it may have been started by a “mouse nest” near the vehicles heater.

No one was injured when the 1982 blue Dodge van caught fire around 8:15 a.m. in the north parking lot of Park Place Apartments, 715 Grant St.

“Whether it was electrical or mechanical we are not sure, but it was accidental,” Charleston Fire Department Capt. Richard Edwards said Monday. “There was just too much damage to determine.”

However, Carl Gilbert, services enterprise manager, who is in charge of university vehicles, believes that the fire might have been caused by a “mouse nest.”

“It happened to me once before,” Gilbert said. “They get up in there with leaves and make a nest if the car has been sitting for a long time, then when you get in there and turn on the heater that coil sets it off.”

He said about three or five years ago he was driving a university moving van and a nest caused smoke to start coming out of the dash; however, it was too wet to start a fire so it just “smoldered.”

Aside from Gilbert’s incident, he said no other university vehicles have caught fire in the past several years.

Sam Fagaly, associate music professor, said he was using the van, which was assigned to the music department, to transport music stands from the Doudna Fine Arts Center to Charleston High School, 1615 Lincoln Ave.

As he headed north on Seventh Street, Fagaly said smoke began to come out of the dash board so he pulled into the Park Place Apartments’ parking lot.

Once out of the van, he said he opened the front hood and “it was clear,” but then he noticed flames coming out of the van’s dashboard.

The music stands were borrowed by the music department from Charleston High School to be used for this past weekend’s EIU Jazz Festival, in which numerous high school students came to Eastern for concerts and clinics to help become better musicians.

Edwards said it was lucky that no one was injured as car fires can be extremely dangerous because shock absorbers, tires and gas tanks can cause sudden and unexpected explosions.

He said the van’s gas tank did not explode because the fire “stayed in the cabin and didn’t get underneath the vehicle.”

University Police Department officers at the scene said that no other vehicles in the parking lot were damaged by the fire, because there was little wind to spread fire and debris.