Unprecedented Pacific Northwest Wildfires Destroy Hundreds of Spokane-Area Homes, Expose Growing Climate-Driven Risk
On a Monday afternoon, Betsy Robertson stood in the main hall of the Spokane Convention Center—but she was not attending a gala or industry conference. What normally serves as the premier event space of Washington state’s second-largest city had been converted into an emergency shelter run by the American Red Cross. Just a few miles outside city limits, three fast-growing wildfires were tearing through entire residential neighborhoods, leaving hundreds of people displaced.
Around Robertson, nurses and volunteer workers moved between rows of folding cots, checking in on hundreds of evacuees. From new mothers with infants to elderly residents accompanied by caregivers, every person received access to warm blankets and enough food. Just beyond the convention center doors, Robertson described the outside air as dangerously toxic, filled with smoke “thick enough to burn your eyes.”
A Washington state native and Red Cross communications director with 10 years of experience in the organization, Robertson has responded to wildfire disasters across the region before—but she says nothing compares to the scale of destruction this year. “The scope of homes lost and lives permanently upended is a whole new level,” she said. “We are already bracing for fire seasons like this to get worse and worse, starting earlier every year and lasting longer into the fall.”
A historically dry winter, extreme regional drought, and repeated record-breaking heat waves created the perfect conditions for the hundreds of wildfires burning across the Pacific Northwest this summer. Dozens of large, out-of-control blazes have ignited in just the past week alone. Even though the fire season is still far from over, Oregon has already broken its all-time annual record for land burned, with nearly 2 million acres scorched. Washington is also facing its most destructive fire season on record, with more than half a million acres burned to date and at least 65,000 residents across the state under mandatory evacuation orders. By Monday afternoon, the three large blazes that sparked near Spokane the previous Saturday had destroyed more than 700 structures.
“I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how we will house all these people long-term,” said Kitty Klitzke, a Spokane City Council member representing a hard-hit district where two fires were still active as of Tuesday morning. Many of the people displaced by the Spokane blazes are senior citizens and their caregivers. “It’s a miracle that, so far, we have no recorded fatalities and no reported missing people,” Klitzke said.
As the planet warms, the conditions that fuel extreme wildfires are growing increasingly common. For every 1 degree Celsius of global warming, a warmer atmosphere can hold roughly 7 percent more water vapor. This pulls extra moisture out of soil and vegetation, leaving forests and grasslands tinder-dry and primed to ignite. This dynamic also causes rain to fall in more intense, less frequent events, leading to extended periods of severe drought.
“This fire, and what we expect to see in coming years, does not make sense unless you connect the dots to a changing climate,” said Bob Freitag, former director of the Institute of Hazards Mitigation Research and Planning at the University of Washington. “The science is clear, and this is not a one-off event.”
Paul Pastelok, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, explained that below-average winter snowfall across the region also set the stage for this year’s fires. Normally, snowpack builds through the winter and melts gradually over spring and summer, providing a steady source of moisture to landscapes. This year, the already small snowpack was hit by unseasonably hot spring temperatures, which made the reserve melt early, leaving the entire region parched by mid-summer. Spokane received only half its typical annual snowfall this year, Pastelok said, and other parts of the state saw even less, with many regions dropping to historic lows.
In recent days, strong winds carried hot embers from the 70,000-acre Little Giant Fire in central Washington more than 3 miles, sending flames jumping all the way across the waters of Lake Chelan to ignite new blazes in forests on the opposite shore. Ryan Rodruck, communications manager at the Washington Department of Natural Resources, called the overall situation “extremely tragic” and noted this season has been exceptionally challenging for the thousands of wildland firefighters deployed across the state.
Benjamin Cossel, a wildfire public information officer from California working with Spokane-area fire crews, warned that high winds forecast for the upcoming weekend could worsen conditions dramatically. Cossel said the Spokane outbreak is comparable to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires: both began in wilderness areas before spreading into partially forested suburban neighborhoods. He added that fire smoke that reaches urban areas is also especially toxic. A recent study found the 2025 Los Angeles fires, which displaced more than 200,000 residents, exposed an estimated 3.3 million people to high concentrations of a cancer-causing toxin.
Klitzke added that the affected Spokane neighborhoods were already known to be vulnerable to wildfire. Steep terrain and abundant vegetation allowed fires to spread rapidly over the weekend, while the winding, cul-de-sac-heavy layout of the subdivisions slowed evacuations and made it harder for emergency responders to reach advancing flames. “These are neighborhoods with thousands of people and only two ways in or out,” Klitzke said, adding that many evacuees were stuck in traffic for hours, watching the homes around them burn.
Areas where residential development mixes with natural wildlands are called the wildland-urban interface (WUI). This type of suburban development is the fastest-growing form of land use in the United States, and research confirms homes built in the WUI are far more likely to be destroyed when wildfires spread. “We already knew this was a dangerous situation,” Klitzke said. “We need to get really serious about addressing climate change.”
Increasingly, fire-prone states like California require homeowners to clear trees and shrubs from a radius around their homes. This cleared buffer, called defensible space, can drastically reduce the risk of a wildfire igniting a home. Cossel noted that many people choose to live in WUI neighborhoods specifically because they value the surrounding natural vegetation. “I understand why people don’t want to remove them,” he said. “But we can’t live in that world anymore because of these fires.”
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
