In the western United States, particularly in fire-prone areas, people have become well versed at preparing to flee. They’re experts at using the tools and technology for monitoring a wildfire’s advance; they consult the Watch Duty app as often as checking the time. They know the three levels of evacuation—Ready, Set, Go—and many perform a running calculation of how much time they might need to get to safety.
On Saturday afternoon, Rita Gregovich was following that script. She wasn’t much concerned about the small wildfire burning across a river from her home in Spokane, Washington, although she’d noticed neighbors running sprinklers on their roofs to make them less immediately flammable and was tracking the fire’s progress on her phone. She was not too worried, either, when she lowered her American flag so that it wouldn’t get too smoky, she told me. Then she stepped around her garage and saw a wall of smoke. “And it was right on top of us,” she said. She and her husband, Dan, would learn, in a moment of rising distress, how much heavier their automatic garage door becomes when the power is out. She would discover what a burning ember feels like when it falls into your shoe.
Nearly 100 large wildfires are burning across the country at the moment, more than half of them in Oregon and Washington, and many of those have prompted evacuations. The three fires converging on Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city, have destroyed 800 to 1,100 homes and other buildings, fire authorities have said, and displaced more than 65,000 people. As more people have moved into forested exurbs and wildfires’ footprints have grown, such evacuations have become a distressingly familiar summer ordeal: a dayslong limbo in relatives’ spare rooms or emergency shelters, pets in hotel lobbies, possessions lugged around in plastic bags. In France and Spain this summer, record-breaking wildfires forced more than 300,000 people from their homes, an exodus that one French minister described as the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s modern history.
An evacuee, for however long, steps into a kind of parallel existence, in which locations remain familiar but the rhythms of navigating them have changed. The route home is the same, but now a National Guard checkpoint stands in the way. Your boss is still eager to see you at work, but suddenly you’re living in a van at the fairgrounds. Almost as soon as the calculation to flee is complete, you must begin the harder, more uncertain calculation about how to hold together your life until you can return, if you choose to do so. At the Spokane County Fairgrounds, an evacuation site for animals, Jennifer Hynek was trying to ease her anxious horses, which were kicking and pacing, unaccustomed to city water and the confines of a stable after living on an 18-acre ranch, a nonprofit horse-boarding facility. (She also brought five goats, two pigs, two dogs, and four cats, but she “left the chickens all at home,” she told me. “Fend for themselves.”) In one evacuation zone in Spokane that was at the highest level of alert—leaving was mandatory—a sign on the door of the closed Little Garden Cafe read Still level 3, hoping for Weds.
But swaths of devastated land are still smoldering, and more heat and wind are in the forecast. Authorities have not yet been able to say when most evacuees can return home. “I know people want to have certainty about ‘When can I get back to my property? When can I get back to my homes?’ We don’t have it,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown told reporters on Monday. “It could be a week. It could be weeks.”
Randall Barkley, a 65-year-old retired Green Beret, spent his first night after leaving home in his Lotus Evora. He loves the two-seat sports car, but he never expected to sleep in it at a park, let alone with another person. He fled on Saturday when he saw flames near a dumpster outside his townhouse and heard the pop of exploding transformers. “The two booms was my cue,” he told me. As he drove away, he watched firefighters hoist patients into vehicles at the Alzheimer’s and dementia-care facility across the street, leaving dozens of tipped-over wheelchairs splayed outside. He and his brother Brian followed the night in the Lotus with one at a “price gouging” motel, as he put it, then a night at Brian’s boss’s house. They never know quite where each day of evacuation will end. “We might sleep in the car downtown,” Barkley told me on Tuesday. “We’re running out of resources.”
The lucky evacuees whose houses still stand may wonder, as they return home to retrieve birth certificates, heart medication, or a pair of pants, whether the gas leak audibly hissing in the wreckage next door will blow them up while they are on their errand. They must consider the inexorably melting side of beef in the now lifeless freezer. The unlucky ones must start thinking about what to buy a teenage daughter who has just lost all of her belongings.
Donna Light learned that her apartment, in a 12-unit building, was gone before she could get there. A friend sent her a photo the day after the fire. She discovered on Facebook that her parents’ home, not far away, had also burned down. On Tuesday afternoon, Light, a 48-year-old who works in hospital administration, poked through the ruins of her apartment, looking for her jewelry and her collection of Polish pottery. Her Honda CR-V was still in its parking spot, charred down to its metal frame. Light had recently given up her rental insurance on her apartment because “nothing ever happens here,” she told me. Her 14-year-old daughter, who kept belongings at both houses, lost everything except for her electronics and a spare pair of pajamas. “We just start from scratch,” Light said.
This is what a successful evacuation looks like, by the most basic measure, at least: So far, in the face of multiple fast-moving wildfires, nobody has been found dead, and first responders have reported no major injuries. The familiarity of evacuation math—when to go, how long to stay away—can be its own kind of protection. Disasters tend to be less disastrous, in certain ways, when the people who face them know what to expect and what’s expected of them.
Police and National Guard soldiers have tended to let people walk or take bikes and scooters back to their properties, but not drive to them. For some people, the walk home covers multiple miles, in the heat of summer, through a bitter pall of smoke. On her way into the disaster zone, Nikki Martin, a 33-year-old caregiver whose home survived, has felt the pang of passing others who had little to retrieve. “One guy held up a brick and a metal Welcome door sign,” she told me. “He said, ‘This is my house, right here.’”
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