Wildfires across more than a quarter 100,000 hectares in Washington state have prompted widespread evacuations and power outages in the Spokane area, state officials said on Saturday evening.
About 4,000 people were fighting more than a dozen fires throughout the state, Dave Upthegrove, the state’s commissioner of public lands, said during a virtual news conference.
Gov. Bob Ferguson declared a statewide emergency and burn ban on Saturday morning. No injuries or fatalities related to the fire were known at this point, officials said. Spokane, home to about 230,000 residents of eastern Washington, is dealing with the Old Trails Fire, which Washington State Forester George Geissler said was active on 1,200 hectares and threatened 4,000 structures.
Some major facilities in Spokane have been evacuated, Mayor Lisa Brown said, including water reclamation facilities, a waste-energy plant and the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital. As of 3:30 p.m., about 200 homes in Spokane had been evacuated, but officials expected that figure to change.
“These are large areas of the city, so I assume it’s going to be more than that,” Brown said.
Utilities company Avista, which services eastern Washington, reported that 60,000 people were without power, according to Stacey McClain of the Washington State Emergency Management Division.
“Our state is facing a very serious situation with multiple fires,” Ferguson said, noting that high winds and high temperatures throughout the weekend would make fighting the fires more challenging.
For the summer so far, about 182,000 hectares have burned in Washington state, Upthegrove said. “This is not normal. … Throughout the state of Washington we’re seeing fires raging,” he said.
The fire in Spokane is one of five “major complex fires” in the state, Geissler said. The biggest, the Kaiser Canyon Fire in the northeastern part of the state, is approximately 54,000 hectares, he said. Wildfires this summer have been a problem in other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Nearly 34,000 lightning strikes last month led to a series of fires and evacuation orders in the southern part of British Columbia.
In addition to the National Guard, firefighters from more than a dozen states are helping, Washington officials said during the news conference.
“It’s a tragedy what we’re seeing over there,” said Maj. Gen. Gent Welsh, adjutant general of the Washington National Guard. “When the sun sets and the sun rises in the morning, I think we’re going to be in shock to see some of the scenes that emerged out there.”
