Spokane County, Washington · 2026

Wildfire risk in Spokane County: the fires keep reaching town

Three times in living memory, wildfire has burned into Spokane County neighborhoods: 92 wind-driven fires in one October day in 1991, the Gray and Oregon Road fires that destroyed over 600 structures on a single August afternoon in 2023, and the Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires that forced 67,000 people to evacuate this month. Our Satelife report for a Medical Lake address returns 49 / 100 — Moderate tier with fire history at 90 / 100 — and finds a single approach route whose first bottleneck sits 55 feet from the parcel.

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Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk: Spokane County”, with the county boundary outlined, Medical Lake, Spokane, Cheney, Nine Mile Falls and Elk marked, and flame icons on the 2023 Gray Fire and Oregon Road Fire areas — Spokane County on satellite imagery — the city on the Spokane River, the ponderosa-and-grass West Plains around Medical Lake and Cheney to the southwest, and the timbered north county around Elk. Flame icons mark the 2023 Gray and Oregon Road fire areas. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

Local context

Three generations of urban firestorm

Spokane County's fire problem is not remote forest burning somewhere upwind. It is fire arriving in town, repeatedly, on the same weather pattern:

16 October 1991 — Firestorm '91. After 42 days without rain, winds gusting to 62 mph downed power lines across the region and ignited 92 fires in a single day, burning roughly 35,000 acres, destroying 114 homes and killing two people.
18 August 2023 — the Gray and Oregon Road fires, the same afternoon. The Gray Fire burned 10,085 acres through Medical Lake and Four Lakes, destroyed 240 structures and killed one person. The Oregon Road Fire burned 10,817 acres near Elk, destroyed 384 structures — 126 of them primary residences — and also killed one person.
1 August 2026 — the Spokane-area fires, still in mop-up as this page is written. The Old Trails Fire (3,226 acres, an arson start) burned into north Spokane neighborhoods; with the Autumn Lane (5,784 acres) and Fairview (992 acres) fires it damaged or destroyed over 900 structures by early-August counts and put some 67,000 people under evacuation.

GOES satellite image from 19 August 2023 showing two large smoke plumes streaming east from the Gray Fire at Medical Lake and the Oregon Road Fire near Elk, Spokane County, Washington — Two towns, one day: GOES satellite view, 19 August 2023 — the Gray Fire (lower plume, at Medical Lake) and the Oregon Road Fire (upper plume, near Elk) burning simultaneously. Source: CSU/CIRA & NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Sources: Washington DNR annual wildfire season reporting · NIFC / WFIGS fire perimeters · HistoryLink (Firestorm '91) · Spokane County emergency management and contemporaneous Spokesman-Review, KHQ and KXLY reporting for the 2023 and 2026 fires.

Terrain & fuel

Ponderosa parkland on the channeled scablands

The county sits where the Columbia Basin's shrub-steppe climbs into the Selkirk foothills. Its signature fuel is ponderosa pine parkland over cured grass — open, park-like stands threaded through basalt scabland left by the Missoula floods, with lakes in the channels and houses among the trees. West of Spokane, the West Plains around Medical Lake, Airway Heights and Cheney are flat, windy and fast-burning; north of the city the timber thickens toward Elk and Deer Park. Both 2023 fires ran through exactly these fuels, in opposite corners of the county, on the same wind.

Our community-scale analysis uses the Medical Lake city boundary — 954 hectares, gridded into 297 analysis zones. The area vegetation layer reads 52 / 100, and the report's surroundings table for our case-study parcel puts the nearest forest wildland front about 656 feet to the west — the direction the Gray Fire came from. Inside the parcel's own 328-foot ring, LANDFIRE classifies the fuel as 100% urban: lawns, streets and houses. That pairing — developed ground with a wildland front two football fields away — is the West Plains WUI in one row of a table.

Satellite view of the Medical Lake city boundary in Spokane County, Washington, outlined in orange between Medical Lake, West Medical Lake and Silver Lake, with the South Salnave Road case-study marker in the town's southwest and visibly burned ground from the 2023 Gray Fire around the lakes — Medical Lake between its lakes on current satellite imagery — city boundary in orange, the South Salnave Road case-study area marked. The pale, sparsely treed ground around the town is the Gray Fire's 2023 footprint. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

Climate does the rest. The fire-weather layer — a thirty-year ERA5 climatology of the Canadian Fire Weather Index — scores 62 / 100 at the parcel, and terrain adds 65 / 100. Summers here end dry: the 1991 Firestorm followed 42 rainless days, and every fire named on this page started between late July and mid-October.

Evacuation

A town of lakes with 25 ways out

Medical Lake evacuated through smoke twice in one afternoon in 2023 — the town itself for the Gray Fire, and the state institutions on its lakeshore under their own protocols. Satelife's neighborhood analysis rebuilds that geometry from the current road graph:

297analysis zones across the 954-hectare city boundary

25independent road exits — no single point of failure detected

10.5 minfastest modelled fire-engine arrival, from a station 6.6 km out

12.5–13.6 minmodelled engine times to the three highest-risk zones

Twenty-five independent exits for 297 zones — 11.9 zones per exit — is a genuinely redundant network for a town this size; the same analysis found no single point of failure. Eleven stations sit within the search radius, including Fairchild Air Force Base Fire Department and Spokane County Fire District 3's Station 33. The caveat belongs in the same breath: drive-times are modelled on OSM-mapped stations and roads, not dispatch reality.

Then the same analysis zooms to one parcel, and the comfortable town-scale picture inverts. At our South Salnave Road case-study address the road-access layer reads 25 / 100: the nearest mapped engine is a healthy 5.3 modelled minutes away, but the parcel has one independent approach route, its first bottleneck just ~55 feet from the property, and the nearest highway — I-90/US-395 — is 3.9 miles away in a straight line and 16.7 miles, a modelled 22 minutes, by road. A town with 25 ways out, made of streets with one.

Excerpt from the Satelife property report for South Salnave Road, Medical Lake: road access layer scoring 25/100, showing 11 stations within radius, nearest engine at 5.3 minutes, one independent approach route with first bottleneck about 55 feet out, and I-90/US-395 at 22 minutes by road — **Report excerpt** — Suppression reach & egress, Satelife property report, South Salnave Road (12 August 2026). One approach route; the nearest highway is 3.9 miles direct and 16.7 miles by road.

What 2023 proved is that the constraint here is not the town's exits. It is time: the Gray Fire crossed from ignition to town edge in hours, on wind — and on streets like this one, the first minutes of that window belong to a single lane.

Exposure

The map reads your lawn. History reads your town.

Here is the tension that makes a Spokane County score worth reading layer by layer. Washington publishes no fire-hazard-severity zone map, so the hazard layer — 30% of the composite, its heaviest weight — is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model. At our Medical Lake parcel that model reads 25 / 100 — Moderate, because the pixel it samples is developed ground: streets and rooftops, not fuel.

The fire-history layer reads the same address at 90 / 100 — Very High, because four mapped perimeters have reached the surrounding area in twenty years, the Gray Fire among them. At community scale the layer reads 95 / 100, with seven perimeters — three of them from 2026: Espanola, Greenfield and Brooks, this month's fires, already in the certified data. A model of what should burn says "moderate"; the record of what has burned says "again and again".

A burned neighborhood in the Old Trails Fire scar near Spokane, Washington, August 2026 — stone chimneys, a destroyed car and scorched ponderosa pines around leveled homes — What "the fire reached town" means: a neighborhood inside the Old Trails Fire scar, Spokane County, August 2026. Source: U.S. Forest Service, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

GOES satellite image from 3 August 2026 showing multiple wildfire hotspots and smoke plumes across eastern Washington, with fires encroaching on Spokane — The 2026 season from orbit: GOES view, 3 August 2026 — hotspots and smoke across eastern Washington, with the Spokane-area fires among them. Source: CSU/CIRA & NOAA, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A hazard model samples the pixel you live on. Fire history samples the town you live in. In Spokane County the pixel is a lawn and the town has burned three times since 1991 — which is why the report's heaviest layer reads 25 and its loudest one reads 90.

Case study

One address on South Salnave Road, scored this week

We ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on South Salnave Road, Medical Lake WA 99022 — the road out of town toward Clear Lake, on the southwest side where the Gray Fire arrived. The composite: 49 / 100 — Moderate tier, at 0.74 confidence — and, as in Travis County, the headline is the least interesting number on the page.

Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for South Salnave Road, Medical Lake: per-layer contributions showing Fire history 90, Vision (imagery) 72, Terrain 65, Fire Weather 62, Vegetation/fuel 41, Road access 25, Hazard 25 and Fire-spread sim 20, each with its weight — **Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, South Salnave Road, Medical Lake WA 99022 (12 August 2026). Composite 49/100, Moderate tier, scored under the United States (usa_generic) adapter.

What drives the score:

Fire history: 90/100, weight 20% — the report's strongest signal. Four mapped perimeters within the search radius in twenty years, the 2023 Gray Fire among them, with the most recent in 2025.
AI vision analysis: 72/100. The model reads the parcel's own aerial and street-level imagery: a maintained suburban setting, but mature tree canopy near or partly over the residence and ornamental vegetation inside the defensible-space envelope, flagged as ember-catchment risk on multiple sides.
Road access: 25/100. Eleven mapped stations and a 5.3-minute nearest engine — but one independent approach route, its first bottleneck ~55 feet from the parcel, and a highway that is 3.9 miles away in a straight line and 16.7 miles by road.
Hazard: 25/100 at weight 30%. Backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model because Washington publishes no hazard-zone map; the sampled pixel is developed ground. Carrying the report's heaviest weight at its second-lowest value, it is the main reason the composite is 49 and not 65.

Excerpt from the Satelife Medical Lake community report: fire history layer scoring 95/100 Very High, listing seven named incidents — Espanola, Greenfield and Brooks in 2026, Wilcox 2025, Olson Hill 2024, and Gray and Walker Lane in 2023 — **Report excerpt** — Fire history, Satelife community report, Medical Lake city boundary (12 August 2026). Seven perimeters in twenty years; the top three rows are this month's fires.

Excerpt from the Satelife property report for South Salnave Road, Medical Lake: the street-view vision sweep scoring 72/100, with the north view flagged for overhanging vegetation and the south view flagged for heavy fuels near the structure — **Report excerpt** — AI vision sweep, Satelife property report, South Salnave Road (12 August 2026). North approach flagged for overhanging vegetation; south for heavy fuels near the structure.

Excerpt from the Satelife property report for South Salnave Road, Medical Lake: fire-spread simulation page showing 30 Monte-Carlo ignition scenarios, a combined 12,507-acre burn footprint, and a pathway table showing 62% of ignited structures lit directly from the wildland front, 31% by embers from neighbouring structures and 7% by radiant heat — **Report excerpt** — Fire-spread simulation, Satelife property report, South Salnave Road (12 August 2026). Thirty modelled ignitions, a combined 12,507-acre footprint; 62% of modelled structure ignitions come directly from the wildland front, and another 38% travel structure to structure once fire is in town.

A parcel the hazard model calls Moderate, on a one-lane approach, in a town fire has entered three times in three years of data. The report's mitigation plan reads like it was written by the road-access table: extend Zone 2 fuel reduction on the north side, audit defensible space annually — and verify access-route width and gate clearance, which on South Salnave Road is not boilerplate but the ~55-foot bottleneck, restated at the scale of a driveway.

Insurance & real estate

After three fire years, the market is moving

Wildfire-related non-renewals in Washington more than doubled between 2021 and 2025 — from 11,763 to 24,106 homeowners — and enrolment in the Washington FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, has grown more than 200% in five years. Carriers increasingly price from third-party wildfire risk scores that can flag whole ZIP codes, which means Spokane County owners can face non-renewal on modelled risk even where their own parcel never burned. After the August 2026 fires the insurance commissioner issued an emergency order — in effect 3 August through 30 September 2026 — restricting cancellations and non-renewals in ZIP codes with fire losses or evacuation orders.

The structural answer is moving through the legislature: Senate Bill 6079, passed by the Senate in February 2026, would create the Strengthen Washington Homes program — state-funded retrofits to the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home standard, with certified homes protected from wildfire-related non-renewal. That makes documented, parcel-level condition the currency of the next underwriting cycle, in exactly the way a Satelife report's vision layer and mitigation plan are built to record.

On the real-estate side, Washington's Form 17 seller disclosure asks about many conditions — but there is no wildfire hazard designation to disclose, because the state does not yet publish one. Until the SB 6120 hazard mapping arrives, wildfire diligence on a Spokane County purchase is commissioned, not looked up.

Sources: Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner · Washington FAIR Plan · Stateline / Spokesman-Review reporting, August 2026 · SB 6079, SB 6120 (Washington State Legislature) · RCW 64.06 (Form 17).

Risk reduction

What Spokane County homeowners can actually do

The report's mitigation plan for our Medical Lake parcel is concrete: extend Zone 2 fuel reduction on the north side, audit defensible space annually before fire season, and verify access-route width and gate clearance on the one approach the parcel has. In ponderosa parkland that work has outsized value — the fuel is grass and needle litter, and it responds to a string trimmer in a way a juniper canyon does not. The county has the infrastructure to help: Wildfire Ready Neighbors, Washington DNR's free home-assessment program, operates in Spokane County, and the local fire districts — Spokane County Fire District 3 among them — run community-preparedness programs sharpened by three fire years in a row.

Against our other county pages, Spokane County rhymes with Travis County, Texas — and then diverges. Both case-study parcels sit on constrained approaches: Steiner Ranch scored 27 / 100 with no mapped fire history and road access at 45; Medical Lake scores 49 / 100 with fire history at 90, road access at 25, and one approach route with a bottleneck 55 feet out. The difference is what the record says: around Steiner Ranch the national perimeter set is empty, while around Medical Lake it holds seven fires in twenty years. And the town-scale story diverges too — Lakeway's network narrows to a single measured pinch, while Medical Lake's 25 exits carry no single point of failure at all. Here the town is fine and the street is the problem. A zone map, if either state had one, would say nothing about any of it.

Coverage

ZIP codes we cover in Spokane County

Satelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in Spokane County. The ZIPs below are the ponderosa pine Wildland-Urban Interface and the 2023–2026 burn footprints communities we are asked about most. One caveat that is the whole point of what we do: the risk score is computed for your parcel, not the ZIP, so two homes on the same street can land in different tiers. Find your area, then run your address.

ZIP code	Community	Why it is on the map
99022	Medical Lake	Case-study town; Gray Fire footprint on three sides
99014	Four Lakes	Gray Fire crossed I-90 here in 2023
99001	Airway Heights	West Plains grass-and-pine interface
99004	Cheney	University town ringed by channeled-scablands fuel
99009	Elk	Oregon Road Fire, 2023 — 384 structures lost
99003	Chattaroy	Little Spokane pine corridor, north county
99026	Nine Mile Falls	Suncrest ponderosa WUI along Long Lake
99021	Mead	North Spokane edge; 2026 Old Trails Fire area
99006	Deer Park	Timbered plateau between Spokane and Loon Lake

ZIP areas per USPS. Washington publishes no statewide fire hazard severity zone map; WUI framing per Washington DNR, whose SB 6120 hazard and risk mapping is in development. Scores are per-parcel, not per-ZIP.

Where to go next

Spokane County wildfire risk in context

Washington wildfire risk The statewide picture: no hazard zone map, two fire regimes, the 2026 season Travis County, Texas The inverse case: low composite, dangerous roads El Dorado County, California Grizzly Flats and the post-megafire risk cycle Create a wildfire evacuation plan Zones, egress routes, refuge areas How Satelife calculates wildfire risk Data sources, score composition, honest limits Run a wildfire risk report PDF + score + mitigation plan

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Spokane County wildfire risk

Is my house in a fire zone in Spokane County?

Washington publishes no statewide fire hazard severity zone map, so there is no official zone to look your address up in. The state is building one — Senate Bill 6120 directed the Department of Natural Resources to develop wildfire hazard and risk mapping — but it is not an address lookup today. Satelife reports say this explicitly on their hazard page: outside California the hazard layer is backfilled from the U.S. Forest Service Wildfire Risk to Communities model. For a property-level answer — fire history, fuels, evacuation geometry and an AI read of your actual parcel imagery — run an address-level report.

What happened in the Gray Fire?

On 18 August 2023, sparked by a faulty utility light, the Gray Fire started just southwest of Medical Lake and burned 10,085 acres in and around the town, crossing Interstate 90 near Four Lakes. It destroyed 240 structures and killed one person, with damage estimated at $60 million. The same day, the Oregon Road Fire near Elk in the north of the county burned 10,817 acres and 384 structures, 126 of them primary residences, also killing one person. Two towns, one day, both fires wind-driven through ponderosa and grass.

Are the August 2026 Spokane fires reflected in Satelife reports?

Yes. Our Medical Lake community report, generated on 12 August 2026, already lists three 2026 perimeters — Espanola, Greenfield and Brooks — in its fire-history table alongside the 2023 Gray Fire. The Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires that broke out on 1 August 2026 burned into Spokane-area neighborhoods, destroyed or damaged over 900 structures combined by early-August counts, and forced some 67,000 people to evacuate. Fire history is the heaviest signal in both of our Spokane County case-study reports.

Will my insurance drop me after the Spokane fires?

The pressure is real. Wildfire-related non-renewals in Washington more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, from 11,763 to 24,106 homeowners, and enrolment in the Washington FAIR Plan — the insurer of last resort — has grown more than 200% in five years. After the August 2026 fires the state insurance commissioner issued an emergency order, in effect 3 August to 30 September 2026, restricting cancellations and non-renewals in ZIP codes with burned structures or evacuation orders. Senate Bill 6079, passed by the state Senate in February 2026, would fund retrofits to the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home standard and protect certified homes from wildfire-related non-renewal. Dated, parcel-level evidence of your property’s condition is exactly what those conversations run on.

When is wildfire season in Spokane County?

The destructive window is late July through early October, and the county’s worst days share one shape: wind. The 1991 Firestorm was an October event — 92 fires in one day on winds gusting to 62 mph after 42 rainless days. The Gray and Oregon Road fires ignited on the same August afternoon in 2023. The Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires all broke out on 1 August 2026 and grew east on sustained winds. Fires here are measured in hours, not weeks.

Scores and evacuation figures on this page are drawn from Satelife wildfire-risk reports generated on 12 August 2026 under the United States (usa_generic) adapter: a property report for South Salnave Road, Medical Lake WA 99022 (run 0e22859e — a complete rerun of an earlier same-day run whose road-access layer degraded), and a community analysis of the Medical Lake city boundary (run 1ea14a49). Washington publishes no statewide fire-hazard-severity map, so the hazard layer is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model; the WRC burn-probability map panels were unavailable in these runs (the point read behind the hazard score succeeded), so flame-length probabilities are not quoted. Drive-times are modelled on OSM-mapped stations and the current road graph and are not dispatch times. Fire figures for the 1991, 2023 and 2026 incidents come from Washington DNR, NIFC/WFIGS and contemporaneous reporting; the August 2026 fires were still in containment as this page was written and their totals may change. Satelife reports are informational decision support — not a substitute for official evacuation orders, state or federal hazard determinations, or an insurer's underwriting judgement.