Thanks for the research. I would say your theory is plausible but some questions remain:
1. Were the flowers in the photo added before or after the fire. (The article in the OP seems to indicate they were added before, which is miraculous if so)
2. Why is the statue not scorched? It’s clearly made of a whitish stone so would easily show soot or scorch marks. I suppose it’s possible someone cleaned it after the fire but there’s no mention of that anywhere.
Like all proposed miracles, there’s always a way to doubt the claim. Sometimes even reasonable ways to doubt. In this instance, I’m not really convinced to doubt. Even if the grass around the statue was too short to spread the fire to the statue the grass itself would still be scorched, as heat and hot ash from the surrounding fire spread to it. It’s not.
I chose to believe the surrounding area (and hence the statue itself) was spared the heat of the fire by Mary. Such power is hers to command but doesn’t originate from her. It’s her Son’s power given to her. For our benefit. If we chose to see.
On the flowers, I believe they might have been there beforehand, yet I did “read” a Spanish article, translated by Google, that seemed ambiguous about that. It suggested that there was some mystery about how the flowers got there, and it sounded like that was possibly considered a “miracle,” too, and my impression was that the meaning was they were placed there after the fire by someone unknown, since it’s a military base, but perhaps I was distracted by their suggestion of a flower mystery and missed their meaning. And this was through Google translation, as I said. But either way, and on the statue, too, if the fire didn’t get within some feet of the statue, and flowers, if they were there, then they wouldn’t necessarily have gotten scorched or soot on them.
Things don’t necessarily burn according to assumptions.
For over a decade, I worked in a restaurant with a charcoal grill. The fire had to be started every morning before the store opened, and then kept going, hopefully, all day (by remembering to add charcoal). Getting the fire going involved putting in the charcoal, then lighting a newspaper put in a drawer below it. It was hardwood lump charcoal, and no lighter fluid or anything was used. There were over exhaust fans turned that helped suck air up through the grill, and the door was left part way open. You would be surprised how hard it could be to get that fire going, and how that newspaper fire might go out before the whole paper was anywhere near completely burned. Anyone who has burned any piece of paper knows the fire can sometimes go out with the paper only partly burned. There were quite a lot of little variables to both the paper and the charcoal, and it was a little bit challenging to make sure the fire got started when it should. Not infrequently, the first attempt at starting it didn’t work.
In this case, I see some different reasons why the area around the statue might not have burned easily, due in part to various practices of human tending, while the high grasses would have burned well. The area around the statue seems to have had just a little grass, or perhaps some other plant that was cut down (because right around the statute, something was there that was cut down by human gardening) with quite a bit of exposed earth, while if you look further on, the grass was thicker and the whole earth solidly burned black. The area with a mix of burned and unburned earth, in splotches, would seem to be where the fire would have been dying out because the grass was so short and sparse, with more ground there than anything. And that makes sense, since as I believe this story mentions, this was a site people came to, so there would have been a clearing there of at least some feet.