Old Trails Fire Forces Thousands to Flee as Ferguson Declares Statewide Wildfire Emergency

A grass fire that started before noon Saturday near Airway Heights had grown into a 3,500-acre urban firestorm by nightfall, jumping the Spokane River and burning into neighborhoods inside Spokane's city limits. Fire and law enforcement officials estimated 50 to 100 homes and other structures were lost in the Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie areas, though a precise count remained impossible more than nine hours after the fire ignited. Thousands of residents fled under Level 3 "go now" evacuation orders, and the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center evacuated all 27 patients to area shelters. Governor Bob Ferguson responded by declaring a statewide wildfire emergency and a burn ban running through September 30, while the Washington National Guard activated for the first fire-weather warning of its kind the state has ever issued. The blaze, named the Old Trails Fire, is one of at least twelve large fires now burning across more than 200,000 acres statewide, in what state officials say is already the worst wildfire year since 2021.

How a Grass Fire Near Airway Heights Exploded Into a City Fire

The fire ignited in the early afternoon of August 1 near Old Trails Road and Euclid Road on Spokane's West Plains, a stretch of open grassland and scattered development west of the city near Airway Heights, according to the Spokesman-Review. Its growth was almost linear in speed: 50 acres by 12:30 p.m., 100 acres twenty minutes later, 300 acres in the early afternoon, 500 acres by 2:08 p.m., and 1,300 acres by 2:58 p.m., according to fire officials cited by KHQ. Before 3:30 p.m., the fire crossed into Riverside State Park and then jumped the Spokane River itself, carrying embers into residential Spokane. By 7:16 p.m. it was estimated near 2,500 acres, and by 8:20 p.m. it had reached 3,509 acres, according to the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Winds gusting 35 to 45 mph drove the spread, arriving on the same day the National Weather Service issued Washington's first-ever "particularly dangerous situation" warning for fire weather, a designation reserved for conditions a step beyond a standard red flag warning. The cause of the fire had not been determined as of Saturday night. Avista, the regional utility, said the fire "did not originate with our infrastructure but has burned into areas of our system," and roughly 40,000 of its customers lost power as flames advanced through its service territory. Out-of-state fire crews, including units from California, were dispatched to help local departments already stretched thin by the state's broader fire load.

Level 3 Evacuations Empty North Spokane Neighborhoods

Level 3 "go now" evacuation orders eventually covered a wide swath of northwest Spokane, bounded roughly by Newkirk Road to the north, Trails Road to the south, Dowdy Road to the east and Westwood to the west, according to the KXLY Firewatch team, then expanded through the afternoon to reach from Marchand Road to Trails Road and from Lyons Road to Assembly Street, per KHQ. A Level 2 "be set" warning extended further, between Division Street and Nevada Street, keeping additional households ready to leave on short notice. The zone encompassed Riverside State Park and the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, which evacuated all 27 of its patients to area shelters as flames approached. The American Red Cross opened a shelter at Spokane Falls Community College at 3 p.m. and a second, larger one at the Spokane Convention Center at 6:53 p.m.; a third opened later at the Spokane County Fair & Expo Center to absorb overflow. Red Cross guidance urged evacuees to bring medications, clothing, documents, hygiene supplies and comfort items if they had time to gather them safely, and city officials told residents displaced from the fire zone to prepare for a minimum 24-to-36-hour absence from their homes given how unpredictable the fire's edge remained overnight. The evacuation zone's boundaries shifted several times through the afternoon and evening as the fire's path changed direction with the wind, which is why officials repeatedly urged residents in adjacent Level 2 areas to stay alert rather than assume the worst had passed them by.

Homes Burn in Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie

By 4:30 p.m., flames were visible near the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, and by 7:30 p.m. homes were burning around Indian Trail Elementary School, according to the Spokesman-Review's hour-by-hour account of the evening. The fire continued spreading through the Five Mile Prairie area and along West Strong Road overnight, well after dark, as crews worked to establish containment lines in high wind. Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels estimated 50 to 100 structures had burned, but cautioned that an exact count was not yet possible given how actively the fire was still moving and how many blocks remained inaccessible to damage assessment teams. Assistant Fire Chief Lance Dahl put the scale of the event bluntly: "There is not a fire department in the U.S. that can handle" a wind-driven fire moving at this speed through a populated area. Washington Air National Guard Major General Gent Welsh, addressing the human toll before residents could even see the damage in daylight, said: "When the sun sets and the sun rises, we are gonna be in shock." No deaths or injuries had been confirmed as of Saturday night, more than nine hours after the fire began, though officials cautioned that assessment was still incomplete and could change as crews reached previously inaccessible neighborhoods.

Ferguson Declares Statewide Wildfire Emergency, Bans Burning Through September

Governor Ferguson's proclamation, issued Saturday, imposes a statewide ban on most outdoor and agricultural burning, including yard debris burning, trash and land-clearing fires, weed abatement burning, and bonfires or uncontained campfires, running through September 30, according to the governor's office. Contained campfires in designated fire rings or pits, and gas or liquid-fueled grills set up at least five feet from vegetation, remain allowed under the order, as does properly permitted agricultural and silvicultural burning. "Our record-setting drought and high winds are creating dangerous conditions across the state," Ferguson said. "I am declaring an emergency to help prevent loss of life and property damage." The proclamation opens access to the multistate Emergency Management Assistance Compact, letting Washington draw firefighting resources from other states, and it authorizes Washington's Adjutant General to activate additional National Guard personnel as needed, beyond the 110 members and 27 helicopter crew members already mobilized earlier in the week. State officials said this marks Washington's fourth consecutive year of statewide drought conditions on record, a run that has left forests and grasslands drier heading into August than they have been at any point since the state began tracking the current drought cycle. The emergency proclamation is what formally unlocks the interstate compact resources and the burn restrictions described above; the National Guard activation two days earlier authorized troop support for firefighting but did not by itself impose a burn ban or open the door to out-of-state assistance.

A Warning Washington Has Never Issued Before

The "particularly dangerous situation" designation that preceded Saturday's fire is new territory for Washington's fire-weather forecasting. It is a category the National Weather Service uses only when extreme wind, heat and dryness combine to make fire behavior unusually difficult to predict or fight, and Friday was the first time it had ever been declared for the state, according to the KXLY Firewatch team. Washington's National Guard has fought wildfires before, most recently in 2021 during the state's previous worst fire year on record, but Saturday's activation came alongside a warning label the state had never used, meant to signal that conditions were beyond what standard fire planning typically anticipates. That gap between the forecast and the response is itself informative: emergency officials had roughly 24 hours' notice that conditions would be extreme, yet the Old Trails Fire still went from 50 acres to city-limits evacuations in under four hours once it started. It is a reminder that advance warning of dangerous weather does not translate into advance warning of exactly where or when a fire will ignite, or how fast it will move once it does. For residents across the state, including those far from Spokane, the designation is likely to recur through the rest of a season officials already describe as historically severe.

The Worst Fire Season Since 2021, and Peak Season Isn't Over

More than 1,000 fires have burned roughly 425,000 acres in Washington so far this year, the most since 2021, and at least twelve large fires were still active across more than 200,000 acres statewide as of Saturday. The Old Trails Fire is only the most urban of three major Washington wildfire emergencies this newsroom has covered in the past week alone, following the Kaiser Canyon Fire near the Colville Reservation and the Little Giant Fire's Level 3 evacuations in Chelan County, a clustering of simultaneous large fires that is itself a signal of how compressed and severe this year's fire weather has been, rather than three unrelated events. The regional history offers a sobering point of comparison: on September 7, 2020, wind gusts up to 50 mph drove the Babb Road Fire through the town of Malden, about 35 miles south of Saturday's fire, destroying 67 homes and 80% of the town's structures in a matter of hours, with no loss of life, according to the Spokesman-Review's five-year retrospective on that recovery. Malden is still rebuilding five years later. That fire, too, started small and low in a basin before wind carried it into a populated area faster than crews could get ahead of it, the same pattern residents in Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie lived through Saturday. With the state's burn ban now running through the end of September and a fourth consecutive drought year on the books, the practical takeaway for residents statewide, including in Kitsap County, is that this year's fire season is not confined to the usual late-August peak. Conditions capable of producing a fire this fast can now arrive in the first days of August, and the margin between a routine grass fire and an evacuation order has narrowed to a matter of hours rather than days.