Spokane Has Lost More Than 600 Buildings in Three Days, and the Mayor Calls It the Worst Disaster the Region Has Faced

More than 600 structures have burned around Spokane since Saturday, and Mayor Lisa Brown called the fires tearing through Washington's second-largest city "the worst natural disaster our region has faced."

Three blazes are driving the damage. The Old Trails Fire began Saturday and has accounted for the largest share of the destruction. The Fairview Fire's forward progress was stopped Sunday night. The Autumn Lane Fire, which merged with the former Meadowview Fire, has been designated the highest priority because it has the most room left to run. Together they have burned about 8.2 square miles, and containment stood at zero as of Sunday night.

Benjamin Cossel of California Interagency Incident Management Team 7, brought in to help run the response, compared the scale of the loss to the fires that leveled neighborhoods in Southern California, saying the situation was "at the same level of a Altadena Eaton Fire or a Palisades sort of event." That comparison is about structures lost inside a populated area rather than raw acreage. Fires of this size in open range country routinely burn without destroying a single home; these are burning through subdivisions.

The disruption extends well past the burn scars. Power outages peaked above 30,000 customers, and more than 10,000 were still dark Sunday evening. Heather Rosentrater, chief executive of the utility Avista, said none of the company's facilities were involved in igniting the fires. Thousands of residents across eastern Washington have been evacuated, some of them returning Sunday to find nothing standing. No deaths have been confirmed, but Brown said Sunday that officials were still assessing the potential for lives to have been lost — a caveat that reflects how quickly the fires moved and how many properties crews have not yet reached.

The Spokane fires are one piece of a statewide emergency. Fifteen major fires have burned more than 250,000 acres across Washington, and roughly 4,000 people are now working the response statewide. Gov. Bob Ferguson, who declared a state of emergency on August 1, said flatly, "We're here for the long haul."

Forecasters offered no relief. Conditions in the coming days were described as a recipe for extreme fire behavior, the combination of heat, low humidity and wind that turns a contained flank back into a running fire front. For a region that has spent a decade watching megafires devour timber and rangeland at a distance, the difference this week is the address: the fire arrived in the neighborhoods.