The Wells Road Fire Forced Malden, Washington, to Evacuate a Second Time

The town of Malden, Washington, spent six years rebuilding from a wildfire that erased 80% of its homes. On Saturday afternoon, it emptied out again. The Wells Road Fire ignited north of town around 4 p.m. and grew to an estimated 1,914 acres by evening, pushed by red-flag winds gusting to 30 mph across the Palouse. Whitman County issued a Level 3 "Go Now" evacuation for Malden and a Level 2 "Get Set" order for neighboring Rosalia, a farm town of roughly 600 people. A second fire, the Palouse River Fire, broke out the same afternoon east of Colfax and burned close to 1,000 acres of its own, splitting the county's firefighting resources between two active fronts. By nightfall, the mayors of both evacuated towns said they had no reports of injuries, but unconfirmed accounts pointed to at least one home lost near Malden, a detail officials had not verified as of early Sunday.

How the Wells Road Fire Exploded in a Single Afternoon

The fire was first reported around 4 p.m. Saturday near John Tye Road, north of Malden, and its growth over the following hours illustrates how fast conditions can turn on the Palouse in August. Whitman County's own updates tracked the fire at 200 acres in the late afternoon, then 800 to 1,000 acres by early evening, then 1,914 acres by the time crews filed their last size-up of the night. A red flag warning covering the Cascades, the Palouse, the Columbia Basin and the Blue Mountains stayed in effect through 11 p.m., with sustained winds of 10 to 20 mph and gusts up to 30 mph. Spokane International Airport, roughly 30 miles north, logged a 21 mph gust at 3 p.m., an hour before the fire started, and relative humidity across the fire zone dropped as low as 8%. Those are the same ingredients, dry fuel, low humidity and wind-driven runs, that have defined Washington's wildfire season since the Old Trails Fire tore through Spokane's outskirts and the Little Giant Fire jumped Lake Chelan earlier this month. Investigators had not released a cause by Saturday night, according to KHQ. The Whitman County Sheriff's Office, which is leading the response, said only that more information would come "as it becomes available," and cautioned residents against speculating before crews had a chance to examine the point of origin.

Level 3 Empties a Town That Had Only Just Come Back

A Level 3 evacuation order is the highest Washington issues, reserved for immediate danger to life, and it meant every household in Malden had to leave without knowing if the town would still be standing when they returned. Rosalia, a few miles south, drew a Level 2 order, meaning residents should be packed and ready to leave at a moment's notice but were not yet required to go. The Whitman County Sheriff's Office described both moves as precautionary, driven by the wind forecast as much as by the fire's current footprint. Pullman Fire District and several surrounding departments sent engines and crews to reinforce local firefighters, and ground and air resources worked the fire through the evening hours while daylight and winds allowed. Speaking outside the Rosalia Fire Department late Saturday, the mayors of both towns said they had received no reports of injuries, a detail residents clung to given how differently the 2020 fire had ended, per an update carried by Yahoo News. "The sheriff's department and, of course, the local fire departments did a fantastic job," Rosalia Mayor John Goyke said of the response. For a stretch of the evening, the county's 911 system was overwhelmed by the volume of calls, a strain that mirrored complaints from the 2020 disaster and that officials had not yet addressed publicly by Saturday night.

The Fire That Erased Most of Malden Once Already

Malden's evacuation Saturday carried a weight most Washington towns never have to reckon with twice. On September 7, 2020, a windstorm blew a tree branch into an Avista power line and ignited the Babb Road Fire, which tore through Malden and Pine City and destroyed 120 homes, roughly 80% of the housing stock across both towns. Malden's population fell from about 200 residents to 145 in the years that followed. Five years on, the rebuilding remains incomplete: only about 25 of the 120 destroyed homes had been rebuilt as of last September, nine of them built with help from Mennonite and Amish volunteer crews. Mayor Dan Harwood secured roughly $17 million in state and federal grants that funded a new community building, housing the fire station, post office, town hall, library and an event space, along with a new municipal well. The town's sewer system remains unfinished, stalled by funding gaps and construction costs that have roughly doubled since 2020. That partial recovery, a handful of new houses scattered among vacant lots where homes once stood, was the town Saturday's fire threatened to undo a second time. Pine City, the smaller adjoining community that burned alongside Malden in 2020, has seen its own slow rebuild, and both towns' residents only recently gained a measure of financial closure: in April 2025, at least 128 people who lost homes in the Babb Road Fire settled lawsuits against Avista Utilities and its tree-trimming contractor for a combined $27 million, with individual payouts ranging from under $100,000 to $375,000 before legal fees. Neither town has the tax base to fund its own fire department, which is why both depend on Whitman County's volunteer districts and, in a fire this size, on state mobilization, the same arrangement that left crews stretched thin when the Babb Road Fire first hit in 2020.

'People Have PTSD': A Town Confronts the Same Fear Again

Last September, on the fire's five-year anniversary, Malden residents told The Spokesman-Review the psychological toll had never fully lifted. "There's a lot of people that still have PTSD when it comes to that. I know my partner does," resident Jessica Landry said at the time. Town clerk Chandelle Frick described a community still working through the trauma of watching most of what they owned burn in a single afternoon. During an earlier smoke scare in 2024 that never reached the town, Mark Butler, who lost his home in the Babb Road Fire, told KXLY that watching smoke rise near town left him and his family nervous all over again, even with the flames still miles off. Saturday gave that same fear a much closer target. Saturday's fire was not a distant plume. It was 1,914 acres and closing on the same roads the 2020 fire used, and it forced the exact evacuation drill residents had hoped never to repeat. Landry's anniversary-week comment from last fall, "Every year it's like, how can you say a happy anniversary to a thing that wasn't happy," reads differently now that the town has spent a second August night wondering whether it will have a town to rebuild further. In a town of roughly 145 people, that overlap is unavoidable: the officials managing Malden's slow recovery, the mayor chasing grant funding, the clerk fielding rebuilding questions, are the same residents who lost their own homes in 2020. A Level 3 evacuation elsewhere might mean packing photos and pets and driving to a hotel for a night. In Malden, it meant reliving, almost exactly, the sequence of decisions residents made five years ago, this time with the added knowledge of just how long the aftermath actually takes to clear.

A Second Fire Near Colfax Splits the County's Crews

Malden was not Whitman County's only fire Saturday. The Palouse River Fire broke out the same afternoon east of Colfax, near Chicken Ranch Road and South Palouse River Road, and grew to roughly 1,000 acres of its own, forcing evacuations in that stretch of the county at the same time crews were fighting to hold the line at Wells Road. Two fast-moving fires burning simultaneously, roughly 25 miles apart, stretched local firefighting capacity thin enough that the Washington State Patrol said state fire resources would be mobilized to reinforce Whitman County's crews, a step reserved for fires that outpace what local departments can handle alone. Neither fire had a reported containment percentage by Saturday night; both remained active and wind-driven as the red flag warning stretched toward its 11 p.m. expiration. For a rural county with a handful of volunteer fire districts and a small paid sheriff's office, two uncontained wildfires converging on inhabited towns in the same afternoon is close to a worst-case scenario, and it is the reason both evacuation orders leaned toward caution rather than waiting for confirmed structure loss. Whitman County Fire District #11 issued its own Level 3 order covering South Palouse River Road and Chicken Ranch Road, and Pullman firefighters later widened that zone to stretch from State Route 272 to Parvin Road as the fire pushed further along the river corridor. The Whitman County Sheriff's Office said some structures were lost in the Palouse River Fire specifically, a separate and so far more concrete loss than the single unconfirmed report circulating out of Malden.

What Two More Fires Mean for an Already Brutal Season

Saturday's fires did not erupt in isolation. Washington has now seen major, evacuation-triggering wildfires break out in three separate regions within the same two-week stretch, Spokane's Old Trails Fire, the Little Giant Fire that jumped Lake Chelan in Chelan County, and now the Wells Road and Palouse River fires in Whitman County, each requiring its own mobilization of state and local resources. That pattern matters beyond any single fire's acreage: it means the state's firefighting apparatus, already stretched by an arson investigation in Spokane and Level 3 evacuations in Chelan County, is now managing active incidents on three fronts at once, with limited crews and equipment to shift between them if any one fire turns. For Whitman County residents, the practical guidance is unchanged from any Level 2 or 3 order: have a go-bag ready, know the evacuation zone boundaries the sheriff's office has published, and monitor Whitman County's emergency alerts rather than assuming a fire's distance from town guarantees safety, given how quickly Wells Road grew from 200 to nearly 2,000 acres in a single afternoon. For Malden specifically, the fire raises a harder question that will outlast Saturday night regardless of how much the town loses this time: whether a community that took five years to rebuild barely a fifth of what it lost can absorb the psychological and financial cost of doing it again, especially with its sewer system still unfinished and its population still nearly a third smaller than before 2020.