--- title: "Spokane says 60,000 evacuated and two official accounts of casualties do not match" description: "Authorities put the number evacuated around Spokane at 60,000. On casualties there are now two accounts that do not agree: Al Jazeera reports fire and law enforcement officials saying there have been no reports of injuries or people unaccounted for, while the local fire chief has said since Sunday afternoon that deaths are anticipated based on radio traffic. Both were current as of Sunday night." category: "U.S." category_url: https://herald.la/category/us author: "Simone Bishop" published: 2026-08-03T04:49:29.000Z updated: 2026-08-03T04:49:29.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/spokane-says-60-000-evacuated-and-two-official-accounts-of-casualties-do-not-mat tags: ["wildfire", "spokane", "washington", "evacuations"] --- # Spokane says 60,000 evacuated and two official accounts of casualties do not match Authorities put the number evacuated around Spokane at 60,000. On casualties there are now two accounts that do not agree: Al Jazeera reports fire and law enforcement officials saying there have been no reports of injuries or people unaccounted for, while the local fire chief has said since Sunday afternoon that deaths are anticipated based on radio traffic. Both were current as of Sunday night. **Update, Sunday 11:50 p.m. PT:** the Spokesman-Review reports the fire has "moderated significantly" since Saturday and that crews were able to stop its advance into further neighborhoods, while warning more homes could still be lost. Level 3 "go now" zones remain active. The casualty contradiction described below is unchanged, and so are the acreage and structure figures. We have been asking since Sunday morning how many people were told to leave. There is now a figure. [Al Jazeera reports](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/3/fires-in-spokane-washington-burn-600-structures-force-60000-evacuations) that authorities evacuated about 60,000 people from the Spokane area, and that at least 600 homes, businesses and other structures have been destroyed. ## The part that does not line up The same report says that "fire and law enforcement officials said there had been no reports of injuries or people unaccounted for." [The Spokesman-Review's account](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/02/wildfire-destroys-640-structures/), updated at 8:56 p.m. Sunday, still carries Fire Chief Cody Rohrbach saying: "There have been no confirmed reports of lives lost, but based on radio traffic, it will be anticipated." Mayor Lisa Brown is still described as saying the city is assessing the potential for lives to be lost. Those are not the same picture. "No reports of injuries or people unaccounted for" describes a situation where nobody is missing. "It will be anticipated" describes officials who expect to find people dead. We cannot reconcile them and we are not going to try. Both are attributed to officials, both were current on Sunday night, and the honest thing is to put them next to each other and let a reader see the gap. The likeliest explanation is mundane: different agencies, different moments, and a fast-moving incident where the search of burned neighborhoods has not finished. But that is our surmise, not a fact, and we are labeling it as such. ## The numbers, and why two of them differ Structures destroyed: at least 600, per Al Jazeera. The Spokesman-Review says 640. Those are compatible. "At least 600" includes 640. Area burned: Al Jazeera puts it at about 8 square miles in the Spokane area, and roughly 386 square miles across Washington state. The Spokesman-Review's figure for the Spokane Complex is about 7,780 acres, which is a little over 12 square miles. Those two do not match either, and the likeliest reason is that they are measuring different sets of fires. We are giving both with their sources attached. Neither source gives a containment percentage. Al Jazeera says some fires in the Spokane area "have not been contained." ## Cause Unknown. "Investigators have not determined how the blazes began," Al Jazeera reports, and the Spokesman-Review says the same. ## What officials are saying about the next few days Senator Maria Cantwell: "We are not out of danger. The next couple of days will be challenging." That is the sentence to carry into Monday. A fire that grew from 5,390 acres to about 7,780 in a single afternoon, in a city where 60,000 people have already been moved, is not a story with a settled ending. ## Our own corrections Two things we have published today have been superseded or complicated. We reported this morning that no source gave a total for people under evacuation orders. There is now a figure, 60,000, and it is above. We have repeatedly published the fire chief's expectation of fatalities without a competing account, because there was not one. There is now, and it is above too. ## Sources - [Fires in Spokane, Washington, burn 600 structures, force 60,000 evacuations](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/3/fires-in-spokane-washington-burn-600-structures-force-60000-evacuations) - [Old Trails fire in northwest Spokane destroys 640 structures](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/aug/02/wildfire-destroys-640-structures/)