Spokane emergency responders practice wildfire evacuation

A brisk spring morning, and volunteers milling around a table with a half-ravaged collection of muffins, gave little reflection Saturday to the serious nature of the exercise: How do emergency crews evacuate a very large Spokane housing development with only a couple of main roads for everyone to escape a wildfire?

The point of the exercise at Eagle Ridge, officials said, was to get homeowners engaged with the idea of how a dangerous wildfire may be and how best to react when faced with the kind of destruction seen when winds fueled the massive Gray and Oregon Road fires that laid waste to areas around Medical Lake and Elk on Aug. 18, 2023.

"Last year, neighborhood residents of the Grandview-Thorpe area just came forward and they said, 'Hey, we have lots of concerns about wildfires in our neighborhood,' " said Sarah Nuss, Spokane's director of emergency management.

"The city is aware of our wildfire neighborhoods, but we have not had an opportunity or made the space to do drills with the community to allow them to practice and to test our regional alert and notification system," Nuss said. "Last year was our pilot kind of trying to decide how we could offer this."

As part of the alert, Nuss, in coordination with the Spokane Fire Department, sent targeted emergency warnings to homeowners. It noted that it was a drill, but officials hoped they would actually take part in the evacuation.

While many homeowners fled as requested on Saturday, the reactions will be analyzed later to help determine what can be done better, she said.

"Last year we got a lot of really good information. We did a survey and wrote a report that's public to the community. We really got a lot of lessons learned," she said. "And what that showed to us is that the drill was meaningful not only for the community but also for the city across multiple realms, and for the county to test the regional alert system."

The effort on Saturday focused on some of the more than 1,200 homes in the Eagle Ridge development, which has only a few streets for ingress and egress, including East Eagle Ridge Boulevard, South Cedar Road and West Qualchan Drive.

By design, only a portion of the homeowners were given level three evacuation notices, indicating they should leave their homes immediately.

"We actually cut this neighborhood in half because the way that a wildfire would come," Nuss said. "It would come up from the southwest corner and move north."

Nuss had hoped to stage two of the emergency-evacuation practice runs a year but will stick with one neighborhood at a time for now. The effort mostly will focus on those that face a threat from a major fire event.

"We just know that we're getting drier and drier with less precipitation and climate change," she said. "So, we know that we're going to have wildfires. This is just a matter of how ready we can get."

Spokane Fire Chief Tom Williams attended the practice, along with several fire crews.

Department spokesman, Justin de Ruyter, said the focus remains on a few neighborhoods in Spokane, like Eagle Ridge and Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie, that have limited access.

"In this drill, we kind of split this up into zones, evacuation zones, and so that's one of the things we'll test today," de Ruyter said. "If you've got to evacuate a big area, you want to be strategic about how you move those people."

As part of the drill, emergency organizers invited a researcher from the University of Idaho who will focus on human behavior during evacuations.

"For us, we drill, drill, drill ... and it becomes second nature when the time comes and we've got to act," de Ruyter said

The idea is to create "muscle memory when these come in real life and you've got winds blowing and power lines out and there's smoking coming throughout the neighborhood and you don't know how far away the fire is," he said. "If you've already got that plan, that preparedness, it just goes so much smoother."

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This story was originally published April 25, 2026 at 7:12 PM.