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People in Spokane, Washington, are reeling from wildfires that decimated whole neighborhoods in the forested city. But as emergency responders take stock of the damage, there is a prevailing sense that this disaster could have been far worse. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: When the Old Trails fire jumped the Spokane River and raced into the city, it burned right up to a park behind Terry and Warren Clark's house...
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SIEGLER: ...They could see the fire from their deck as they evacuated and helped their 91-year-old neighbor escape.
WARREN CLARK: As you see, that's a wooded area right behind our house. It's part of the city's Wyakin Park. It's a natural area. So we butt up to all the fuel (laughter).
SIEGLER: Welcome to what fire officials call the wildland urban interface, or WUI, where forests meet densely populated, and in Spokane's case, long-established neighborhoods. The Clark's house was spared. They're looking at it down the street from behind a police roadblock because they're still under a mandatory evacuation order.
TERRY CLARK: So...
W CLARK: We're blessed.
T CLARK: You know, this is a minor hiccup for us. We are so lucky.
SIEGLER: Not to discount the destruction - hundreds of homes were lost - but there's a feeling this could have been way worse. No one died, unlike on Maui, where more than 100 people lost their lives, and in LA in January of last year, wildfires killed more than 30 people. All of these are urban firestorms that ignite in wildlands, but spread into a city where the homes, not the forests, become the fuel for rapid spread. The Clarks had about an hour's notice to pack up and leave, and then it took them two hours just to go a couple miles.
T CLARK: It was like the apocalypse. It was so weird.
W CLARK: When you learn later they were evacuating 65,000 people...
T CLARK: Yeah.
W CLARK: ...And everybody wants on the same roads (laughter).
T CLARK: Yeah.
SIEGLER: For Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels, that number - the 65,000 people - should be the lead story. It wasn't just residents fleeing. They had to evacuate nursing homes, a dementia care center, the entire VA hospital campus, and they did it pretty fast.
JOHN NOWELS: And if you think about what that entails, the fact that we were able to get people out of those areas within several hours in an active fire zone is pretty incredible.
SIEGLER: No wildfire is the same, and some of this may just be luck, but experts say jurisdictions are getting better about coordinating and learning from mistakes of the past. Hugh Safford says there's also better forecasting than even 10 years ago. He's a former fire ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service in California who now teaches at UC Davis.
HUGH SAFFORD: When there's a - you know, a big red-flag warning, if there are resources available, i.e., there are trucks and firefighters who are not assigned to a - you know, an active event, they'll send them up there, and they'll be ready.
SIEGLER: Which happened in Spokane ahead of a well-publicized fire weather warning across the northwest that extremely high winds and heat were coming. The West had its warmest and driest winter ever, but local leaders here have been worried about this very kind of fire for years and have been trying to prepare.
SARAH NUSS: I know. We've been warning about this. I think wildfires have just been increasing over the past decade.
SIEGLER: Sarah Nuss is Spokane's director of emergency management.
NUSS: We've seen with climate change and environmental concerns around water, we are in a place where it's dry, and it's hot. And we are building into the wildland urban interface.
SIEGLER: Spokane is built out into dense stands of old-growth pine. In the last year, Nuss' office led two mass evacuation drills with hundreds of residents in fire-prone neighborhoods. Ironically, one had been scheduled soon for where the Old Trails fire is now burning. But Nuss thinks these drills may have taught them how to better avoid traffic bottlenecks that can turn deadly.
NUSS: People were able to get out in a reasonable amount of time, you know, and we did not see anyone - have not to this day, you know, learned of any deaths or injuries related to evacuations or the fires.
SIEGLER: Because there's a lot of data to study now, cities and first responders may be getting better with managing the fire crisis in the moment, but fire experts say little has been done about the bigger picture - the rapid development into wildlands, suppressing natural wildfires so now there's so much fuel, and human-caused climate change.
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SIEGLER: All of this is making firefighting a more dangerous job.
JOSE IBARRA: You see - right now that stump over here right next to us is, like, smoking.
SIEGLER: Crew boss Jose Ibarra from Salem, Oregon, is spraying a hose on that smoking stump. The smoke is dense in the air as the engine hums behind him, near where the Old Trails fire burned down half a cul-de-sac.
IBARRA: No, no (ph). But yeah, we don't want it jumping the line or, you know, causing more damage to homes.
SIEGLER: It's hard work, Ibarra says, and most of it these days is in towns, not forests. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Spokane, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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