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| A woman rushes her dog away as her house burns down Saturday during the Spokane wildfire. She reported lost other pets in the blaze, |
Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2016. Gatlinburg, Tennessee, also in 2016. Paradise, California in 2018. Lytton, British Columbia in 2021, the Boulder, Colorado area, also in 2021. Lahaina, Hawaii, 2023. Pacific Palisades and Altadena, California in 2025.
It's been quite a decade for fires blasting through North American towns and cities. The above is only the highlight. Numerous other smaller towns have lost many of their homes and businesses in other fires
Now, it's Spokane.
In just an afternoon and evening on August 1, more than 600 homes burned down in and around Spokane. Once again, we saw the horrible scenes of hasty evacuations, roads clogged with cars with panicked, fleeing families inside.
History has other big fires smashing through towns of course. A wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin that killed perhaps 2,000 people.
An 1881 fire in Michigan killed 282 people. An 1894 Minnesota wildfire killed more than 400 people. And in 1910 the so-called Great Fire swept through five million acres in Idaho, Montana and Washington.
These urban firestorms seemed to calm down in much of the 20th century. Sure there were a few, like the Oakland-Berkeley Hills firestorm in 1991, which killed 25 people. But too many of us assumed we had conquered the threat of a wildfire plowing into a town or a city
But now they're back. Especially over the past decade, as we noted.
WILDLAND-URBAN INTERFACE
One problem is the wildland-urban interface. More and more people are moving into woodsy areas as suburbs expand into once unpopulated areas. The appeal is obvious: A beautiful forest in your backyard, wildlife wandering by. It's hard to resist.
The wildland-urban interfaces or WUI's, are not just in the western states. The states with the most houses in WUIs are California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
There's always talk of adaption in these zones, to keep the house from burning. Clear the brush and the trees away from the houses. Clean the gutters. That kind of thing. But judging from the way the ravaged neighborhoods in Spokane appeared.you can't fully adapt yourself out of extreme wildfires.
The neighborhoods that burned were typical suburbia. Nice lawns, flower beds. Scattered decorative trees. The flammable pines and spruces safe in the background. Or so you'd think.
Under normal circumstances, when a single house goes up in flames, due to an electrical problem, clumsy kitchen cooking, an unattended candle, a small army of firefighters arrive. Neighboring houses get soaked down so they don't burn, too.
In wildfires, there's never enough personnel to protect every home. The entire forest behind the neighborhoods is on fire. Embers are everywhere, setting fire to the old leaves in the gutters, sneaking into the attic vents, setting the area beneath the roof on fire. The pretty decorative cedar against the foundation - dried out by months of drought - bursts into flames amid the sparks. That blaze quickly sets the house on fire.
On and on the fires go, hopscotching from one house to the next. In the end, in Spokane, at least 700 houses succumbed. That's how it works in the wild land-urban interface.
DRY WEATHER/CLIMATE CHANGE
We knew there would be trouble in eastern Washington on Saturday. It's been building since this past winter. Unprecedented warmth and a lack of snow meant the landscape dried out much earlier in the spring than it usually does.
It doesn't rain much during the summer in eastern Washington. Normally June precipitation is 1.17 inches in Spokane. This year, Spokane received just 0.26 inches. The city usually gets just under a half inch of rain in July. This year, there was only a trace.
The area is absolutely arid at this point. This weekend a dry cold front passed through the region. West winds with the cold front gained momentum as they raced down the east slopes of the Cascade mountains, drying out as they did so,
The smallest sparks erupted in to firestorms on Saturday, and the disaster landed.
By Sunday, 920 firefighters were battling the blazes in and around Spokane. That number was expected to rise to 2,000 during this week. More than 65,000 people had been evacuated, with no word yet on when all of them will go home.
The weather forecast across the Pacific Northwest is discouraging. The wind has diminished, but it will remain dry and hot for the foreseeable future. Winds are expected to increase this coming weekend, but they won't be as strong as they were last Saturday.
It's no coincidence that these urban and suburban wildfires have increased over the past decade. It's not just the wildland-urban interface. Spokane is a great, sad example. Climate change helped make the winter warmer, the summer drier. You see it over and over again. Paradise, California hit because the winter rains were late. Same thing happened in Altadena in 2025.
Climate change has made things so much more extreme. So much more predictable. And this summer, the extreme weather continues, given an added boost by a wildly strong El Nino.
The fires near Spokane, in the rest of Washington State and the West overall will burn indefinitely. Probably until the winter snows fly.
LOUSY CONDITIONS/LOUSY PEOPLE
Spokane wasn't the only wildfire problem. As of Sunday, seventeen major fires encompassing 260,000 were burning across Washington. In Oregon, wildfires have burned more than 2 million acres, by far the most acreage on record. August and September tend to be the peak fire season in Oregon.
The record for an entire fire season - set in 2024 - is about the same as what has burned so far this year in Oregon
On Saturday, the wind and the dry air around Spokane and other areas of the Northwest made fighting the fires impossible. They basically morauded unimpeded through forests, scrublands and finally neighborhoods,
"There is not a fire department in the United States that can handle a wind-driven event this size," said Assistant Spokane Fire Chief Lance Dahl.
The spikes in wind over the next couple of months will likely lead to more homes burned this year. Maybe not hundreds at a time like in Spokane but enough to hurt many, many more families.
The end result of this conflagration in Spokane was so many moments of normal daily life cruelly interrupted. Per the Spokane Spokesman-Review:
"Signs of children lingered on sidewalks where hopscotch was chalked. Stone stairs that once led to a wraparound porch led to nothing Smoldering foundations were still hot enough to melt shoes."
At one, the homeowner found nothing salvageable except for a muffin tin. At another house, it was complete devastation except for a koi pond. The fish in the pond somehow survived. At yet another destroyed home, a father instructed his son to take a brick from the house as a memento. He'd already done that.
The most infuriating thing about the Spokane disaster is its apparent cause - arson. On Monday, Aaron Farinacci, 37, was arrested in Spokane for allegedly starting the Old Trails Fire, the largest and most destructive of three large fires in and around the city.
As NBC News reports, the fire began at around 10 a.m. Saturday A witness told police the saw the man looking into the trees an was later seen crouching at the side of the road near some grass before he "stood up and looked very nervous" and walked away, said Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels .
Police detained Farinacci Saturday about a half mile from where the fire started. He had waterproof matches and a butane lighter on him. Authorities let Farinacci go, apparently mostly because the most important job at the moment was understandably evacuating people hastily.
On Sunday, investigators determined the Old Trail Fire started exactly where the witness saw Farinacci crouching, leading to Monday's arrest. At last check he's being held on $1 million bond.
So far, I haven't seen a motive for the arson.
Farinacci is (allegedly!) the worst but not only horrible idiot associated with the fires. We saw at least 26 incidents of people flying personal drones over the fires. That mean officials had to ground air support for safety reasons, hurting the firefighting efforts.
By the way, flying drones over an emergency zone is a federal crime.
In Oregon, the Jefferson County Sheriff's office are warning boaters on Lake Billy Chinook could be completely shut down for recreation if people don't stop interfering with firefighting efforts. Onlookers have repeatedly gotten too close to planes and helicopters as they scoop water from the lake to fight nearby fires, Central Oregon Daily News reported.
Goons are watching the fires, for afar, too, coldly trying to make money off the blazes. These days you can bet on anything.
Prediction marketshare allowing people to place bets on wildfires.
"In a letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates prediction markets, Sens. Ron Widen and Jeff Merkley joined lawmakers from other wildfire-stricken states in urging the agency to crack down on wildfire-related contracts. The group warned the markets could create financial incentives for arsons and criticized what they described as profiteering from disasters affecting vulnerable communities."
Reportedly, the 2025 Los Angeles fires prompted more than $1 million in wagers. Since then the betting market has grown exponentially.
THE REST OF US
As is always the case with these big wildfires, it becomes everybody's problem. Thick smoke is billowing across the Pacific Northwest, set to create intense air pollution in cities like Portland, Eugene, Vancouver and Seattle.
The smoke, combined with smoke from dozens of other western wildfires is drifting across the nation. Virtually everyone across the continental U.S. is either experiencing occasionally hazy skies and smoke, or will soon.
So, our lungs will once again suffer the consequences.
As we've already noted, these huge wildland-urban interface wildfires have become disconcertingly common. Pretty much every year now. The droughts, the heat, the weird extremes brought on by climate change continue to take their toll.
Sadly, there's plenty of time for another Spokane this summer and fall. There are so many towns and cities in California, Oregon, Washington and other western states that are sitting ducks for these kind of extreme wildfires
Climate change won't stop anytime soon. It's another new normal in our abruptly hotter world. Some parts of the world are taking serious steps to combat climate change. The United States meanwhile, remains completely unserious about the problem.
The money from the fossil fuel industry is too tempting for our so-called leaders. Too many Americans are willfully ignorant, as they prattle on about chemtrails and conspiracies and shrill references to an irrelevant hot spell in the 1930s.
Nobody deserves to have their home burn down in a wildfire of course. Including those who say climate change is a hoax. But unfortunately, these firestorms will continue. Denial or not.
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