The town of Malden, Washington, spent six years rebuilding from a wildfire that erased 80% of its homes.
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.
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.
The town's sewer system remains unfinished, stalled by funding gaps and construction costs that have roughly doubled since 2020.
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.
A wind-driven wildfire near Malden grew to nearly 2,000 acres Saturday, triggering a Level 3 evacuation of a town that lost 80% of its homes to the 2020 Babb Road Fire and has rebuilt barely a fifth of them since.