The largest, most destructive wildfire in Washington state history just torched at least 640 structures inside Spokane's city limits, displaced 60,000 people, and forced the evacuation of a VA hospital — and every outlet covering it wants to talk about the wind.
The Old Trails fire started near Airway Heights on Saturday and, driven by 45 mph gusts, ripped northeast through Riverside State Park, jumped the Spokane River, and burned through the working-class neighborhoods of Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie. Spokane County Fire District 3 Chief Cody Rohrbach called it "probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington's history." Mayor Lisa Brown said Sunday the city is "still assessing the potential for lives to be lost." No deaths have been confirmed, but Rohrbach warned they are "anticipated" based on radio traffic.
Randy Bui came to Spokane from Vietnam nearly 30 years ago and built a life on West Tiffany Avenue. Now there's a clump of charred metal and blackened brick where his home stood. "It's gone, all gone," Bui told the Spokesman-Review. Nearby, his neighbor's pool was the only thing left of their house. Entire streets were razed. One family lost three homes between them.
The Guardian covered the scope — 390 square miles burned across the state, 8.2 square miles in Spokane alone — and noted that fires across the West are "stretching the ability of federal, state and local agencies to fight them." CNN focused on the weather easing and the heroics of California's Incident Management Team 7, which arrived Saturday night. The Spokesman-Review gave the most ground-level account — the convention center sheltering 409 families, police running anti-looting patrols, the sour-metal smell hanging over leveled neighborhoods.
What none of them touched: why a fire that started on open ground was able to race unimpeded through a state park, cross a river, and consume a city. Riverside State Park — government-managed land where fuel loads build up because environmental lobbying blocks the logging, thinning, and controlled burns that used to keep western forests from becoming incinerators. The green groups that litigate every timber sale and protest every prescribed burn aren't anywhere in this story. Neither is the money trail — which environmental organizations pour millions into lobbying to lock up federal and state forest land, and which politicians in Olympia and Washington, D.C., cash in on.
Senator Maria Cantwell showed up at the press conference to say "the next couple of days will be challenging." That's the same Cantwell who has spent decades backing the regulatory framework that makes active forest management nearly impossible on federal land. Governor Bob Ferguson declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard — after the fire, not before the fuel load.
The pattern is the same every fire season: working people lose everything, politicians show up for the cameras, the press blames the weather, and the lobbying apparatus that created the tinderbox gets a pass. The 409 families sleeping in the Spokane Convention Center this week didn't lose their homes because of wind. They lost them because decades of green policy turned their surrounding landscape into a bomb waiting for a spark.
The wind will die down. The question that won't get asked at the next press conference is the one that matters: who profited from the policies that let this happen, and who's going to pay for the rebuilding?
