WASHINGTON, USA – Wildfires raging on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, for a third day have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in and around the state’s second-most populous city, officials said on Monday, August 4.
The cluster of three blazes ranked as the top firefighting priority in the US as a whole, including the drought-parched Pacific Northwest, where dozens of major wildfires have been burning for weeks, degrading air quality across a wide region.
The Spokane-area fires have scorched more than 3,200 hectares since erupting on Saturday, August 1, on the northern fringe of the city, home to about 230,000 residents west of the Rocky Mountain foothills near the Idaho border.
Video footage from the fire zone showed a kilometers-long column of smoke creeping through treetops as airplane tankers swooped overhead, dropping scarlet-colored fire-retardant slurries onto the blaze.
Enormous palls of smoke billowed into the sky north of the city, as flames devoured forest land 10 km from Spokane’s downtown. Elsewhere, suburban homes lay in smoking ruins among charred trees. Other video showed fires burning along wooded ridge lines above adjacent dwellings.
