Wildfires around Spokane, Washington burned more than 600 structures and forced roughly 60,000 people from their homes over the weekend and into Monday [1]. No injuries or missing persons have been reported. The cause is undetermined and the fires are uncontained [1].
Sen. Maria Cantwell said the area is "not out of danger" [1].
That 60,000 figure closes something this desk left open. On Sunday we reported the same fires with two evacuation numbers side by side, because the two versions of one wire story carried different ones: an earlier copy said 5,000 homes evacuated, a later update of the same story said 60,000 people. We printed both, attributed each, adopted neither, and said we could not find an emergency-management source for either. We also noted the arithmetic problem, that 60,000 people spread across 5,000 homes would mean twelve people to a household.
Monday's reporting carries 600 structures and 60,000 evacuations in the same account [1]. The likeliest explanation is that the two figures were never really in conflict. One counted dwellings under an evacuation order at an earlier hour; the other counted people as the order widened through the weekend. That reading is ours, not the source's, and we are not stating it as established.
What is established is the scale. Sixty thousand people is roughly a quarter of the city of Spokane's population, displaced over two days, with the fires still burning and no cause identified. Evacuation counts are not trivia: they size shelter operations, they appear in disaster-declaration requests, and they are the figure a state cites when it asks the federal government for money. Getting them right is part of getting the response right.
The count is not final. Uncontained fires move, and evacuation orders expand and lift.
