Spokane Wildfires Destroy Hundreds of Structures, 60,000 Evacuated

Emergency centers were set up at the Spokane Convention Center and the local fairgrounds Saturday night for residents with recreational vehicles and those who brought animals and pets, the city said. “Leave now! This may be your only notice,” one emergency alert warned. People “must leave now due to life-threatening conditions in your area!”

Washington deployed 100 National Guard members to help local authorities manage the emergency. “Every one of those National Guard members is here to assist you and is here to assist the Spokane law enforcement community,” Major General Gent Welsh, the Washington National Guard adjutant general, said Sunday. “Don’t make up any other reasons for why the National Guard is on your streets.”

For weeks, fires across the Pacific Northwest have burned thousands of acres, sending plumes of acrid smoke across the US and Canada. Power was shut off to residents around Spokane and further south to prevent electric equipment from sparking wildfires, Avista Corp., which serves four states, said on its website. The company operates 2,300 miles of transmission lines through the region.

More than 11,800 customers remained without power across Washington as of Sunday afternoon after reaching a peak of 17,600 customers in the morning, according to PowerOutage.com. Over 9,000 of those customers are in Spokane County.

Elevated fire weather conditions are expected to persist across eastern Washington and parts of 12 other states as dry winds sweep the area, the US Storm Prediction Center said. Parts of Montana, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming face a level 2, or critical, risk of fires on Sunday. Temperatures in Spokane were forecast to reach 82F Monday, the National Weather Service said.

At least 10 large fires were burning around Washington. Through July 29, 1,038 blazes had burned 426,666 acres, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, said in a statement on Friday that an area roughly half the size of Rhode Island has burned so far this year. Crews from at least 14 states and Australia have been fighting the blazes alongside Washington National Guard troops. “As a state, we’ve already hit the fifth largest amount of acres burned this century,” Upthegrove said.