Whipped by fearsome winds and fueled by a tinderbox of dry vegetation, three wildfires ignited on the edge of the wildland-urban interface in eastern Washington and rapidly destroyed hundreds of homes.
The destruction is familiar to those in the L.A. region because, in 2025, residents lived it. The ongoing Spokane fires, like the Palisades and Eaton blazes, exploded near residential areas, during extreme fire weather on the heels of extremely dry winters.
Santa Monica Fire Deputy Chief Tom Clemo has barely slept since Saturday. He’s spent the last three days based in a high school in Spokane leading a command post of crews assigned to the Spokane fires, which have thus far burned more than 700 structures.
Clemo is all too familiar with the haunting parallels between the ongoing blazes and the firestorm that ripped across L.A. County last year. But this time there is hope that lessons from the Los Angeles fires are being applied in Washington.
“What we have been witness to and are managing now is a wind-driven brush fire that resulted in an urban conflagration in neighborhoods similar to [those in the] Palisades and Eaton [fires],” Clemo said. “They’re small in footprint but enormous in damage.”
Both the Spokane and Los Angeles wildfires ignited while a “Particularly Dangerous Situation” was in place, the most extreme wildfire warning issued by the National Weather Service. It means that low humidity, powerful winds and high temperatures are creating the perfect conditions for wildfires to spread voraciously.
Saturday marked the first time such an alert had been issued in the state of Washington.
At 3 p.m. that afternoonm Clemo got the call to head north.
He serves as incident commander for California Interagency Management Team 7, a federally coordinated group trained to help lead the response to wildfires across the nation.
“We grabbed all 123 members of the team, put them on the road, drove north to Spokane and immediately moved our operations personnel into the field to assist with the management in the initial attack,” he said.
After a historically snow poor winter in Washington, the forests and shrublands of Spokane quickly burned as winds fanned the flames in the exact direction of suburban neighborhoods. The Palisades and Eaton fires also took place after an usually dry winter, which turned the region’s brushy hills into prime fire fuel.
Perhaps the clearest example of lessons learned from the Los Angeles fires was the haste with which local law enforcement worked to evacuate residents, Clemo said.
“The sheriff evacuated 60,000 people out of a portion of Spokane in a matter of two hours without injury or accident,” said Clemo. “That’s unbelievable.”
Thus far there have been no fatalities reported in the Spokane fires, even though tens of thousands of people lived in the direct path of devastation.
The handling of evacuations emerged as a point of criticism in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires, which killed 31 people. This was especially the case in western Altadena, where alerts came hours after the blaze started and almost all of the Eaton fire’s 19 deaths occurred.
Clemo also said that Washington worked hard to stage fire resources in response to the Particularly Dangerous Situation warning.
“There was an early call for a lot of resources and a lot of pre-positioning,” he said. “The region upstaffed quite a bit and that was difficult because there were already a bunch of fires burning in Oregon and Washington.”
Around 1,000 firefighters were on the ground Monday, a number that is expected to double in the coming days as mutual-aid crews continue to arrive — including hundreds of firefighters from California.
Clemo’s team is largely made up of firefighting personnel based in Southern California and the Central Coast, including members from Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Ventura. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has dispatched about 150 personnel and 20 engines to Washington, while individual California fire departments are also loaning crews.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department, for example, sent an eight-person camp team and a three-person dozer crew to the Spokane wildfires on Monday, according to a department spokesperson.
Though resources have been rapidly mobilized and evacuations, thus far, carried out effectively, the Spokane fires nevertheless remain on track to become some of the most destructive blazes in the state’s history. The blazes had collectively charred some 8,000 acres Monday afternoon with 0% containment.
Calmer winds and cooler temperatures assisted fire crews in their battle against the Spokane blazes Monday, but temperature are anticipated to climb back into the 90s by Wednesday and continue to push firefighters to their limits.
The size of the L.A. firestorms dwarfs the Spokane blaze. In L.A. County, the twin fires destroyed nearly 16,000 homes in several communities.
Yet many of the same forces of rising temperatures from climate change, winds and development near open space were the same.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
