Spokane Burns, and Oregon Passes Two Million Acres

On the first weekend of August, the fire season arrived inside a city of a quarter million people. Three separate fires — Old Trails, Autumn Lane, and Fairview — burned into Spokane’s wildland-urban interface under the wind event the Particularly Dangerous Situation red-flag warning had forecast. Roughly 60,000 residents were placed under evacuation orders. More than 600 structures have been reported destroyed or damaged, with counts still moving; regional reporting is already calling it the worst urban wildfire disaster in Washington in recent memory.

Governor Bob Ferguson declared a statewide emergency and imposed a statewide burn ban, citing record-setting drought and high winds. The Old Trails Fire alone accounts for the majority of the structure loss on Spokane’s northwest side. Air quality from Spokane to Portland has moved between Unhealthy and Hazardous as smoke from the urban fires mixed with the regional load and an intrusion from British Columbia.

The Record Nobody Wanted

Oregon has now passed two million acres burned in a single season, a modern record, with 33 active large fires inside the state. Nationally, NIFC’s August 4 situation report counts 99 uncontained large fires and 5,253,328 acres year to date — 138% of the ten-year average — with more than 27,400 personnel committed, over 15,000 of them in Oregon and Washington alone. The national system is at Preparedness Level 5, its highest tier. In the north Cascades, the Little Giant Fire northwest of Leavenworth stands at 24,360 acres, zero percent contained, with Level 3 orders in Chelan County. The Rowe Creek Complex is at 313,439 acres and 55% containment. Big Grass, still the nation’s largest at over 340,000 acres, is 25% contained.

PCSN’s corridor tracker, refreshed this afternoon, reads 239 active fires on 3.47 million acres across the eleven-state corridor. The season-severity index stands at 65.1, VERY HIGH, its highest reading of the season. The fire-activity term is pinned at its ceiling; what is holding the composite below EXTREME is the absence, for the moment, of a corridor-wide east-wind event, and an ENSO term computed from the annual-mean anomaly that has not yet priced in the El Niño now established in the Pacific.

If You Are in the Corridor

Check your county’s current status on the My Area page — enter a ZIP code and it returns nearby fires, risk percentile, air quality, and links to your county’s official alert system. The emergency page lists verified evacuation and alert channels for every corridor county, in English and Spanish. If you are in smoke, the air-quality page carries live sensor readings. Evacuation levels are decided by your county sheriff or emergency management agency, not by this site: if they say GO, go.

The journal’s three preceding entries reconstruct how the season got here: the ramp into July, the lightning siege, and the week the corridor broke open.