Don't know the timing of the Middleton fire but there was a unusually high community power surge reported by Ting near Wellpoint last Monday morning impacting 620 other homes using Ting so it was widespread.
Ting
This is the kind of surge the SECO protection is designed to mitigate and illustrates the usefulness for a whole house surge protector.
The voltage spike below was measured at the output of surge protection doing its job - the surge voltage on the power line side was likely higher.