A fire that crossed into the city
A wildfire that started around midday Saturday on the West Plains outside Spokane, Washington, ran northeast through Riverside State Park, crossed the Spokane River and burned into residential neighborhoods on the northwest side of a city of roughly 230,000 people. By Sunday, officials counted more than 600 homes, businesses and other buildings destroyed and about 5,000 homes evacuated, according to PBS NewsHour and the Associated Press.
The Old Trails Fire was one of three burning in the Spokane area and later managed together as a complex, alongside the Fairview Fire and the Autumn Lane Fire northwest of downtown. Local reporting put Old Trails at roughly 3,481 acres, Fairview at 914 and Autumn Lane at 3,333; ABC News reported the combined footprint above 7,700 acres by Sunday, after earlier tallies of about 5,390. In the Suncrest area of Stevens County, an ember started a separate fire that took at least three homes along Meadowview.
No deaths had been reported as of Sunday. The Spokesman-Review, quoting fire officials, reported that the “potential for lives to be lost” had not passed while the fire was still moving. The cause remains under investigation.
Counts that kept moving
The structure count shifted through the weekend as damage assessment teams worked behind the fire. Spokane County Fire District 3 Chief Cody Rohrbach put the figure at 640 destroyed structures on Sunday, many of them inside Spokane city limits. The Washington State Standard reported 700 structures destroyed and more than 65,000 people under evacuation orders. Spokane Fire Chief Justin De Ruyter said the early estimate was “low,” adding that “there are hundreds of primary residents that were affected within the city itself.”
Level 3 “go now” orders covered a wide arc of northwest Spokane and the Suncrest and Mount Spokane areas, with Level 2 and Level 1 zones layered outside them. The Spokane Convention Center opened as the main shelter and held more than 400 people overnight, with Red Cross support. Avista shut off natural gas service in affected areas and ran public safety power shutoffs, and tens of thousands of customers lost power.
Readers tracking this event should expect the numbers here to be superseded. Acreage, structure counts and evacuation figures were all revised more than once between Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and outlets reporting at different hours published different totals.
What the crews were up against
The National Weather Service had issued a “particularly dangerous situation” red flag alert — its highest wildfire-weather tier — for eastern Washington on Saturday afternoon, with sustained southwest winds of 20 to 30 mph and gusts to 50. Gusts of 35 to 45 mph were forecast again Sunday. Assistant Spokane Fire Chief Lance Dahl described the limit that creates: “There is not a fire department in the U.S. that can handle a wind-driven event this size.”
Benjamin Cossel, a public information officer with a federal response team sent from California, put it similarly to PBS NewsHour: “We have weather working against us, and we have terrain working against us.” California Interagency Incident Management Team 7 assumed command Sunday morning, and incident commander Tom Stokesberry called it the nation’s top wildfire priority while cautioning that “this is still an active firefight.”
Governor Bob Ferguson declared a statewide wildfire emergency Saturday and imposed a burn ban through September 30, and Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown declared a city emergency. About 100 Washington National Guard members were activated, including helicopter crews that by Sunday had dropped roughly 924,000 gallons of water across more than 1,000 bucket loads and 137 flight hours. Thirteen firefighting task forces were mobilized, the state Department of Natural Resources committed crews, engines, bulldozers and aircraft, and FEMA authorized Fire Management Assistance Grants covering up to 75 percent of eligible firefighting costs.
A regional season, not a local event
Washington entered August — its driest month — in a fourth consecutive year of statewide drought. More than 1,000 fires had burned roughly 425,000 acres in the state by the end of last week, the most since 2021. “Our record-setting drought and high winds are creating dangerous conditions across the state,” Ferguson said. Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove was blunter about the margin left: “Any new spark on our tinder dry landscapes can lead to another devastating wildfire.”
The rest of the region is absorbing the same conditions. The lightning-caused Big Grass Fire on the Oregon–Idaho border had burned nearly 525 square miles and was threatening more than 600 homes and 800 other structures; another fire in eastern Oregon’s Stinkingwater Mountains had covered about 336 square miles. Oregon has seen more than 1.7 million acres burn this season with roughly 30 uncontained large fires. “The whole northwest is heavily impacted right now,” said Keila Vizcarra, a spokesperson for the federal team on Big Grass.
The near-term forecast offered nothing helpful: sunny and dry through the week, with temperatures climbing back above 90 degrees by Wednesday. Once a fire is running in 40-mph wind through cured grass and brush, the decisions that still matter are evacuation and triage. The decisions that could have changed the outcome were made earlier, on fuel and on the first few feet around a house.