The detail that tells you what kind of fire this is: it jumped the river.
The Old Trails fire "jumped the Spokane River, raced up the bluffs and began burning neighborhoods," The Spokesman-Review reported. Six hundred and forty structures have been destroyed.
Winds gusted between 35 and 45 mph for hours. The fire itself had burned nearly 4,000 acres, with a combined figure of 5,390 acres across nearby fires as of Sunday morning. Tom Clemo is the incident commander.
On the deaths
None have been confirmed. That is not the same as none having occurred, and the fire chief said so rather than letting the number sit.
Cody Rohrbach, the Spokane County Fire District 3 chief, said there have been no confirmed reports of lives lost, "but based on radio traffic, it will be anticipated."
We are printing that sentence as he said it because it is an official telling the public, in advance, that the count is likely to change. That is the responsible version of a casualty figure in the first 24 hours, and readers should treat 640 structures and zero confirmed deaths as a snapshot taken while the fire was still running.
Four hundred and nine families spent the night at the Spokane Convention Center.
What the evacuation levels mean
Washington uses a three-level system, and the words matter because they are instructions.
Level 1 is "get ready." Level 2 is "get set," meaning be prepared to leave immediately. Level 3 is "go now."
Both Level 3 and Level 2 zones were in place around the Old Trails fire. Angelenos used to a different vocabulary should note that Washington's Level 2 is closer to what California would call an evacuation warning, and Level 3 to an evacuation order.
The other fire
The Fairview fire, near Mead, was at roughly 981 acres and zero percent containment as of 11 p.m. Saturday, with an update expected around midday Sunday.
It burned through the Saddleback gated community, where the paper describes some homes appearing untouched and others reduced to foundations and metal skeletons. That patchwork is characteristic of an ember-driven fire in a subdivision and is one of the cruelest things about this kind of event.
Daniel Ramey, a public information officer with California Incident Management Team 7, is working the Fairview fire. That is the direct Los Angeles connection here: California crews and command staff are in Washington because Washington's own are committed elsewhere.
Why the state has nothing left
Washington has burned nearly 500,000 acres this year against roughly 247,000 for all of last year.
Dave Upthegrove, the state's public lands commissioner, put it plainly: "Folks are stretched thin. We are exhausting our resources."
Rohrbach said the country is at PL-5, the highest national preparedness level, which means competition for crews and aircraft is at its maximum. Florida and Alaska have sent personnel to Washington and Oregon.
He also said this, which is the line worth carrying out of the story: "These fires move fast, and they can be deadly."
What we could not confirm
The cause. It is under investigation.
Also the total number of people under evacuation orders, as opposed to the 409 families sheltered, and the speaker behind a characterization of the Old Trails fire as probably the largest and most destructive in Washington's history. That phrase appears in the Spokesman-Review's own headline, but we could not establish from the text who said it, so we are not attributing it to anyone.
Deepti Singh, a climate scientist at Washington State University Vancouver, is quoted on the longer-term arithmetic: "The smoke will probably go away within a few weeks, but the greenhouse gases that are released will stay for many, many years."
