Old Trails Fire Toll Jumps to 640 Structures as Spokane Says It's Still 'Assessing the Potential for Lives to Be Lost'

The confirmed damage from the fire that tore through Spokane's West Plains and jumped the Spokane River Saturday night has climbed sharply since the first overnight assessment: 640 homes, businesses and other structures destroyed, according to incident commanders who briefed reporters Sunday, up from an initial estimate of 50 to 100 issued as the fire was still burning. Incident Commander Tom Clemo told reporters the blaze was "probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington's history," a claim state officials had not disputed as of Sunday afternoon. No deaths have been confirmed. But Spokane Fire Chief Cody Rohrbach and Mayor Lisa Brown both stopped short of ruling out fatalities, telling reporters that radio traffic from the fire's worst hours makes loss of life "anticipated," even as assessment teams continue working through the burn scar. Roughly 5,000 homes remain under evacuation orders, more than 400 people spent Saturday night at an emergency shelter inside the Spokane Convention Center, and Gov. Bob Ferguson has widened a statewide burn ban through Sept. 30 while requesting federal disaster assistance directly from President Trump. The fire, named Old Trails, is one of at least a dozen burning across more than 200,000 acres of Washington, part of what officials are now calling one of the state's most destructive wildfire stretches on record.

From a 50-Structure Estimate to a Confirmed 640

When Washington's Department of Natural Resources and Spokane fire officials gave their first damage estimate Saturday night, they described 50 to 100 homes and structures lost in the Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie neighborhoods, a number they cautioned was impossible to verify while the fire was still moving. By Sunday, that figure had jumped to over 600 in wire reports from the Associated Press, and to a more precise 640 in local reporting from the Spokesman-Review, whose Sunday-afternoon count came hours after the national wire had already settled on "600-plus." That gap is not a contradiction so much as a snapshot of how fast an urban-interface fire outruns its own damage assessment: crews are still moving block by block through the Indian Trail, Five Mile Prairie and Suncrest areas, and officials from both the city and the incident command team say the final number is likely to rise again before an official count is closed out. The Spokane Area Fires complex, now a formal merger of the Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires, has burned roughly 7,700 to 7,800 acres combined, according to fire officials' Sunday briefing, with Old Trails itself accounting for around 3,500 to 4,000 of those acres depending on which agency's Sunday-afternoon mapping is used. Officials have not explained the discrepancy publicly, but it is typical of active-fire mapping, where satellite perimeter estimates and ground-crew counts are updated on different schedules.

"It Acted Like a Tornado": Voices From the Shelter

More than 400 people spent Saturday night at a shelter inside the Spokane Convention Center, opened after the original Red Cross site at Spokane Falls Community College lost power, according to the Spokesman-Review's reporting from inside the shelter. Taylor Hansen, who lived near Riverside State Park, said he had only seconds to leave after a police officer pounded on his door: "The cop just barreled down the cul de sac. He said, 'You gotta go now!'" His neighborhood did not survive. "It acted like a tornado basically," he said of the fire's path. Kyle and Valerie White learned their Windermere-area house had burned from a Facebook video before they'd even finished evacuating; they grabbed documents, family photos and a PlayStation 4 before leaving with their dogs around 3 p.m. Saturday. "Just unbelievable how people take care of you in these situations," Valerie White said of the shelter's volunteers. Tiffany Rush fled a Level 3 zone with her two children by Lyft, navigating roads clogged with fire engines and fleeing neighbors. Volunteers at the shelter have included therapy dogs from Lutheran Church Charities and a county fire chaplain offering counseling, alongside cots, food, water and pet supplies for evacuees who, in many cases, do not yet know whether they have a home to return to.

A Question Officials Won't Yet Answer

National wire coverage of the fire, including reporting carried by ABC News and Fox Weather, has largely framed the human toll in settled terms: no deaths reported. That framing is technically accurate but sits ahead of what Spokane's own officials were willing to say Sunday. Fire Chief Cody Rohrbach told reporters, "There have been no confirmed reports of lives lost, but based on radio traffic, it will be anticipated." Mayor Lisa Brown, in a separate briefing, said the city was "still assessing the potential for lives to be lost." Neither official identified a specific missing person or gave a timeline for when an official casualty count might be confirmed one way or the other. The distinction matters: a national story that says "no deaths reported" describes what is confirmed at publication time, not what officials on the ground believe is likely once search teams finish clearing the roughly 640 destroyed structures. Extra police patrols have also been deployed across evacuated neighborhoods to prevent looting while those areas remain off-limits to returning residents. The randomness of who got caught illustrates why officials are hedging: Fox Weather reported that the Dwight Merkel Sports Complex was evacuated mid-event, with a volleyball tournament interrupted as smoke and flames closed in, while the region's VA Medical Center had to move all of its patients to outside hospitals and shelters hours earlier as the fire crossed the river. Neither location was a residential area where officials had been tracking occupancy, which is part of why a precise, confirmed casualty count is taking longer than the structure count.

"The Top Fire in Our Nation": Washington's Emergency Widens

Gov. Bob Ferguson, who declared a statewide state of emergency Saturday as the fire crossed the Spokane River, spoke directly with President Trump as Washington formally requested short-term federal emergency aid, according to the Spokesman-Review's Sunday reporting, and the Department of Homeland Security has pledged its full support. FEMA has since approved Fire Management Assistance Grants to help cover firefighting costs. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell described the Spokane fires as "the top fire in our nation" in comments reported by KHQ, meaning it is currently drawing the federal government's top priority for firefighting resources even though a separate Idaho-Oregon border fire, the Big Grass Fire, has burned a far larger 525 square miles. The Washington National Guard, activated Saturday for the state's first-ever "particularly dangerous situation" fire-weather warning, is helping with evacuations, traffic control and firefighting support. A 120-person California incident management team arrived Saturday night to help coordinate the response, and Ferguson's burn ban now runs statewide through Sept. 30. The federal attention reflects competing priorities within the same disaster season: the Fire Management Assistance Grants approved so far cover firefighting costs, a narrower category of federal aid than the individual assistance homeowners would need to rebuild, which typically requires a separate presidential disaster declaration. Meanwhile, crews from California, Oregon and other states are being split between the roughly 12-square-mile Spokane complex and the much larger, 525-square-mile Big Grass Fire straddling the Idaho-Oregon border, which is burning through far less populated terrain, which is part of why Cantwell's "top fire in our nation" framing is about population risk rather than raw fire size.

How This Compares to Washington's Worst Fire Years

Incident Commander Tom Clemo's assessment that Old Trails was "probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington's history" is a claim, not yet an official finding, but it reflects how unusual Sunday's damage count is for a fire that started as a grass fire near Airway Heights barely 30 hours earlier. State officials count at least a dozen large fires currently burning across the state; Fox Weather's Sunday reporting put the actively burning total at more than 200,000 acres, with roughly 425,000 acres burned statewide so far this season. Those two figures describe different things: the smaller number is fire currently active, the larger one includes ground already burned and since contained elsewhere in the state. The National Weather Service's "particularly dangerous situation" designation issued Saturday, reserved for conditions a step beyond a standard red flag warning, had never been used in Washington before this weekend. Public information officer Tom Engberg told the Spokesman-Review that the adjacent Fairview fire near Mead had "moderated significantly" by Sunday, one of the first signs of the broader complex easing even as the Old Trails damage count continued to rise. What makes Old Trails unusual among Washington's historically destructive fires is not its size, which is modest next to the state's largest rangeland burns, but that it crossed directly into a dense residential grid inside city limits rather than staying in the wildland-urban fringe, which is the specific comparison Clemo's "most destructive" framing is built on.

What Comes Next for Spokane

Cooler temperatures moved into the region Sunday, but the Spokesman-Review's fire-weather coverage warned that windy conditions returning around noon could again risk pushing the fires' spread, and Fox Weather forecast temperatures climbing back above 90 degrees by Wednesday alongside wind gusts of 35 to 45 mph. The City of Spokane has opened a donation portal to organize relief for Old Trails evacuees, and Gonzaga University has opened dormitories to displaced university employees. Entertainment events and concerts across Spokane have been canceled through at least this week as venues and city resources are redirected to the response. For the thousands of families still under Level 1 through 3 evacuation orders, officials say the priority now is finishing structure-by-structure damage assessments, confirming whether anyone remains unaccounted for, and determining when it will be safe to allow residents back into the hardest-hit stretches of Indian Trail, Five Mile Prairie and Suncrest. The statewide burn ban through Sept. 30 signals that Washington's fire managers expect the underlying conditions, dry vegetation, high winds and triple-digit heat potential, to keep posing a serious risk well into the fall. Air quality warnings remain in effect across the region as dense smoke continues to reduce visibility, and residents outside the evacuation zones are being advised to limit outdoor activity until conditions clear. For evacuees, the most immediate practical question, when they will be allowed back to see what, if anything, is left standing, remains unanswered; officials have said only that block-by-block reentry will follow the completion of structural safety inspections, not a fixed calendar date.