Earlier this month, the Spokane Complex Fires ripped through neighborhoods in the city, damaging more than 800 structures and forcing the evacuation of an estimated 65,000 residents. One person died from medical complications she suffered while evacuating from a nursing home.
Despite the loss of homes and other structures, the injury impacts of the fires were less severe, thanks in part to the city’s second-ever evacuation drill in April.
Sarah Nuss is the director of emergency management for Spokane. She joins us to share more details about the drill and its effectiveness in helping get tens of thousands of individuals safely out of danger.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this month, the Spokane Complex Fires ripped through three parts of the city, damaging more than 800 structures and forcing evacuations of more than 65,000 people. One woman died from medical complications she suffered while evacuating from a nursing home. But the fires could have been even deadlier. City officials say that a drill in April increased awareness of wildfire evacuation procedures and helped residents prepare and respond.
Sarah Nuss is the director of emergency management for Spokane. She joins us now. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sarah Nuss: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Miller: I want to start with how the city is actually doing right now after these devastating fires. I’ve read and I mentioned that over 800 buildings burned. How many of those were homes?
Nuss: I can only speak about the city itself. There have been damages across the county as well, but in the city, we’re facing around 600 homes damaged.
Miller: Where are people who lost their homes staying right now?
Nuss: We’re trying to get a good grasp on that right now. There are folks staying in the region at various locations, lodging, as well as with friends. We know folks that are staying outside of the region as well temporarily and some permanently. We’re still working with the survivors to understand their needs and look at where folks are at.
Miller: Do you have a sense now for what recovery is going to look like in the months or the years to come?
Nuss: We just know this is going to be a very long recovery. As you know, with most disasters like this, especially when homes are completely destroyed or even partially destroyed, it just takes a long time, from the immediate hazardous cleanup to the longer-term debris cleanup to the rebuild process and all those challenges that come with competition for that as well. So right now, we’re just trying to meet with survivors and understand what their needs are, so that we can get all of our local resources together and understand what their unmet needs might be.
Miller: I want to turn to the drill that you did back in April. What was the purpose of it?
Nuss: This actually the second drill we’ve done. We did a pilot last year in another wildland-urban interface neighborhood, also known as the WUI area. The residents of that neighborhood came to me last year and said, “We’re really concerned about how we get out. What does that look like for us? Can you help us practice?” And I said absolutely.
So starting last year and again this year, we had two drills in different areas, with the goal of helping residents practice and learn about their role in evacuations for wildfires. The goal wasn’t necessarily for the city to practice, our first responders getting out there – though our first responders were present and participating in all of that. The goal was to test our alert and notification system for the region, meaning the way that we send out alerts to catalyze people to take action for immediate life safety threats. To test that system to see people got it, understand what the barriers might be to people using that or knowing how to use it. And then people had the opportunity to physically prepare and evacuate their family and their pets. So that was the intention behind the drill.
Miller: I’m really struck by what you mentioned at the beginning there, that the impetus for this was not city leaders or emergency managers like you saying, “Hey, residents, this is important. You should do this. You should brush your teeth, you should eat your broccoli.” It came from them. What are the concerns that you heard?
Nuss: Yes, I love that you caught on that. Because, frankly, the success of these drills and the power of them is resident and community member driven. I am a team of one, so what I can accomplish and what we can accomplish in our region is very reliant on the community. Yes, they came to me and they said, we take our preparedness seriously. We understand the things that you folks are doing, but we want to know what we can do and how we can not only practice this one time, but how could we do this iteratively to build those capability gaps as residents, as neighbors, as a community?
So moving forward and doing these drills, our goal is to do a drill in every single wildland-urban interface area in the city one time, and then to circle back and do follow-up exercises and drills based on the residents survey from that drill to learn about what might be most impactful for that neighborhood. Both drills, we captured survey data to understand how things went.
Miller: How many people in the end took part, either in signing up for the alerts, or physically getting in their cars and practicing driving away?
Nuss: Our first drill, we call that the pilot drill, we had about 300 folks participate. But in this second drill that we had this year, we had about 850 folks participate. And I shouldn’t say folks, I should say vehicles. We counted vehicles of households. That could mean multiple households, multiple people, but that many vehicles passed through our checkpoints.
Miller: How do you prevent people from needlessly making a situation that is purely a drill unsafe when they are practicing an evacuation? If unsafe things happen because they’re getting away in a real emergency, that’s just unfortunate, but I imagine that might happen. But if it’s purely a drill, it seems like something you really want to avoid. How do you prevent that?
Nuss: Yeah, great question. So like I said, our first responders were engaged. They were staged across the drill, observing and being present as a visibility presence. But realistically, my personal opinion was communication and education. Ahead of these drills, we created an informational page on our city landing page, and I went out into the neighborhood and put up A-frames with QR codes on them linking folks to that informational website. We also did education through all of our other communication channels, through social media, through the neighborhood councils, through the news. We did lots of education about the fact that this drill was happening, and shared safety tips and what the goals were.
So the ahead-of-time preparedness and education about what everyone’s role is, combined with having safety professionals on site, and us engaged, and the press was there, I think really equipped everyone with understanding their role and how they can go about keeping themselves and others safe during this drill.
Miller: I want to turn to the communication piece, which seems like such a challenge at the state level, at the federal level, and at local levels as well. My understanding is that you all recently switched to a new regional alert and notification system. What prompted that?
Nuss: Yes, great question. That is actually run through our entire county, and the county emergency management and our dispatch are lead for sending those notifications. The reason that they switched to a different internal system – we call it ALERT Spokane, that’s our catchphrase for our alert notification system – they changed because the previous vendor they had been working with had had some cyber hacking situations, and it was no longer a useful tool in a secure way for our region.
Miller: Did that mean that people who were previously signed up for alerts had to sign up again? Or were they transferred over seamlessly?
Nuss: That was actually part of the communication ahead of this drill. We did a giant push to get folks signed up into this newer version of this tool. We were concerned that folks who might have been signed up before wouldn’t have been legacyed in or moved over to the new system. So we did a giant push about a month ahead of this to try and let folks know that that change happened and we’re not sure how many folks would get moved over. We actually found, through the drill and now through real disaster, that we are pretty confident that most folks got moved over. So we’re still educating about that campaign, but not seeing the gap there that we could have had.
Miller: There are a couple of ways to think about the effects or benefits of a drill. One is in the residents themselves who asked for it and their experience of kind of a dry run. The other is what you all at the city level can learn from the same drill. I’m curious about that second part. What lessons did you take away from these two exercises, the pilot and then the bigger one in April?
Nuss: Great question. There are a couple of things we took away. Number one is understanding resident expectations and behavior. And you can find the after action review report for this on our city landing page. Anyone can go there and find it, and read about this entire exercise.
But I would say understanding a bit more about resident expectations. As professionals, we kind of get in our mind about “people know to be ready, right?” But I think hearing feedback from the survey and understanding, “Yeah, we get that we need to go, but we don’t understand exactly how you’re phasing the evacuations and want to hear more about that.” So we got some great information feedback from folks about what they’d like to see to help themselves prepare as individuals and households.
But importantly also, we were able to sort of look at physical locations along the roadway and otherwise that we as city planners anticipate being bottlenecks or challenge areas for when we’re doing mass movement of people, or even ingress incoming first responders. So with this drill, we did have lots of observers at those points that we had predicted might be challenging. And in watching resident evacuation behavior, we’re able to actually validate those complexities and those challenges, so that as we move forward in development or otherwise into these areas, we can make better decisions around how we’re planning to make sure we have safe ingress and egress around complicated WUI areas.
Miller: WUI, again, the wildland-urban interface, which is increasingly where Americans live. They like the prettiness of forests, mountains or whatever, and homes are being built in places that are more at risk of fires.
You said you want to do these drills in all of the wildland-urban interface areas of Spokane. Can you give us a rough sense for how much of the city would technically be in that category?
Nuss: I can’t speak on population, but I can tell you that basically the entire west and northwest area of town is covered in wildland-urban interface. So is the northeast. So those are our big focus areas on WUI.
Miller: The real fire or fires came just four months after the drill. Was that enough time to implement the lessons or changes that you took from the drill?
Nuss: Yes and no. Yes, we’re using the resident behavior and questions that we learned about expectations and gaps in understanding to improve education, to target our outreach. But as far as any large changes in infrastructure, those are planned on a yearly basis as we get new developments and things like that. So no, those things are in progress and making move right now.
Miller: Did the fires threaten any of the specific neighborhoods that you included in the drills?
Nuss: No, unfortunately the area that experienced this wildfire was set for next spring, our next drill. So, obviously now that something has happened there, we will not be doing a drill there. We will be documenting the lessons learned, and we will certainly circle back to that neighborhood to offer them when we do the second iteration. But this is not the right time for us to be doing that.
Miller: You didn’t just have to evacuate single-family homes in the fire, but nursing homes, a dementia care center, the entire Veterans Affairs hospital complex campus. How did those larger evacuations go in the real fire?
Nuss: By all means, it would appear that they were pretty smooth in that there was no vehicle accidents, no injuries. Yes, we do have one person who passed away, as you mentioned. There were not large amounts of injury or death related to evacuations. So, yes, I would consider those to have been successful in a life safety way.
Miller: What lessons do you think other cities or counties can learn from your recent experiences, both the two drills and the fire itself?
Nuss: The drills for sure. What I can say is that individuals and households want to know what they should be doing, right? I don’t think we all want to sit around and just hope that the first responders will show up at our house. We want to understand what our role is in our household, in our community, in our neighborhood, how we can look out for our neighbors and how we know where we’re supposed to go or what we’re supposed to bring when something happens. I do see this is a good way for people to learn about, you need to come to the residents, you need to let them be a part of these drills, you need to let them lead the work, and tell you how it’s going to be done. It’s not always for us to come and tell people how to do things.
And as far as lessons learned from the fire, I’m really hoping that everyone that lives in a wildland-urban interface or an area that has a wildfire risk is just learning that it’s so crucial to be signed up and understand how to receive emergency alert notifications, understanding how you will know what’s going on, and then understanding those actions, looking at the actions that our residents and community members here took to get out quickly, listening to our first responders who were trying to get them out safely. I think it’s a pretty great lesson here that if you take action, follow those directions and work together, that it can be safer.
Miller: Sarah, thanks very much.
Nuss: Thank you.
Miller: Sarah Nuss is the director of emergency management for the city of Spokane. She joined us to talk about the destructive complex of fires that hit Spokane earlier this month, as well as the wildfire evacuation drill the city did earlier this spring.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
