MAPPED: How Spokane’s Wildfires Turned a Small Footprint Into Massive Loss

Kami Fehlig had about half an hour to decide what her family could carry out of their Spokane, WA, home.

She and her husband loaded their two daughters and dog into their cars, along with a wedding album, baby books, and pet supplies. Then the power went out, and the warning became urgent: “Go now, go now,” Fehlig recalled to Reuters.

By Wednesday, officials estimated that the three fires burning around Spokane had forced 67,000 people to evacuate and destroyed about 850 buildings—Fehlig’s home included.

“This particular neighborhood has been pretty wiped out,” she said.

By the measure most often used to describe a wildfire, however, the Spokane fires barely register.

More than 2.3 million acres had burned across the Pacific Northwest as of Thursday, amounting to the worst fire season the region has seen in 30 years. The three Spokane-area fires accounted for roughly 10,500 acres—less than 1% of that total.

The contrast exposes a limitation in how wildfire destruction is often understood and communicated: Acreage may quantify how much land burned, but it too often misses how much a community lost.

And that measure is becoming more important as wildfire risk spreads well beyond the places typically associated with it. More than 1,100 communities across 32 states have conditions associated with destructive urban wildfires, according to an analysis from Headwaters Economics, an independent nonprofit research group. More than half—52%—are outside the West.

The smaller fire destroyed nearly four times as many buildings

Even among the fires burning around Spokane, acreage tells a very different story from the destruction on the ground.

As of Thursday, the Autumn Lane Fire had burned 5,870 acres and destroyed an estimated 156 structures, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center—making it the largest of the three blazes.

The Old Trails Fire had burned 3,574 acres—nearly 40% less land—but destroyed an estimated 600 structures, almost four times as many buildings.

An Aug. 5 analysis from Cotality, a property analytics company, shows the disparity another way.

The Old Trails perimeter contained 1,476 residential properties, compared with just 123 inside Autumn Lane’s—12 times as many homes within the smaller fire’s boundary.

The financial exposure tells much the same story. Residential properties within Old Trails represented an estimated $694.1 million in reconstruction cost value, compared with $68 million inside Autumn Lane.

How do you measure destruction? It depends

“There’s a lot of different ways to measure destruction,” Ryan Handy, a wildfire and land-use expert with Headwaters Economics’ Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program, tells Realtor.com®. “The acreage: How big was the fire? Then there’s the residential losses, and then there’s the structural losses, and there’s also the human losses.”

Each captures a different dimension of the same disaster, but so too, can each measure radically change which fire appears most destructive.

Consider two of California’s most devastating wildfires.

The 2021 Dixie Fire burned 963,309 acres—more than six times the 153,336 acres consumed by the 2018 Camp Fire. Yet Dixie destroyed 1,311 structures and killed one person. Camp destroyed 18,804 structures and killed 85.

By acreage, Dixie was more than six times larger. By structural loss, Camp was more than 14 times as destructive.

“You could have a very small fire in terms of acreage that has a devastating impact in terms of economic losses and the cost to human life and human livelihood,” Handy says. “That’s why, since we focus on communities in our work, we look at structures lost as opposed to acreage.”

But putting a number on that is an exceedingly difficult thing to do.

Headwaters has worked to make structural losses more visible through its national database of structures destroyed by wildfire. The analysis draws primarily from federal Incident Status Summary reports, known as ICS-209 forms, which can track acreage alongside evacuations, injuries, fatalities, and structures threatened, damaged, or destroyed.

But the figures are often being compiled while the disaster is still unfolding.

“They’re working under a lot of pressure, and it’s hard,” Tara Preston, a data engineer with Headwaters Economics, tells Realtor.com®.

A “structure” also doesn’t necessarily mean a home: The category can include businesses, barns, garages, sheds, and other buildings. And local damage assessments can continue changing after federal incident reports are filed.

“There will be discrepancies,” Preston says, “just because of the nature of the stressful environment that they are also entering these data within.”

Headwaters’ goal is not to replace those records, but to make them easier to find and use. “We’re just trying to surface it in a means that is more understandable to the general public, and that people can make informed decisions with,” Preston says.

And understanding why those losses can become so concentrated requires looking at what happens when wildfire reaches the built environment.

When the neighborhood becomes part of the fire

An urban conflagration begins as a wildfire but, once it reaches a developed area, the built environment can become part of the fire itself.

“Homes are fuel for fire,” Handy says. “They spread wildfire through communities. In some cases, much more effectively than trees do.”

Windborne embers can travel miles ahead of the main fire. Once they fall, they can ignite a roof, deck, woodpile, or any other combustible material. And when a home catches fire, radiant heat and new embers can threaten the buildings around it.

At that point, acreage and human toll can begin to diverge. A fire doesn’t have to travel far to destroy hundreds of homes or displace tens of thousands of people. What matters is no longer only how far the fire travels, but what—and who—is in its path.

That confluence is part of what prompted Headwaters to look beyond the places traditionally associated with major wildfire disasters.

In a 2025 analysis, researchers examined 10 recent urban conflagrations that each destroyed more than 500 structures, then used U.S. Forest Service data to identify communities sharing two of their defining conditions: a high likelihood of nearby wildfire and substantial potential for home loss.

More than 1,100 communities in 32 states met those thresholds—52% were outside the West. Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama ranked among the 10 states with the greatest numbers of communities carrying the identified risk factors.

“Wildfire risk is much more pervasive than flood risk,” Handy says. “It exists everywhere. It exists in places that people don’t even think about.”

That alone is a remarkable statement. Over 24 million U.S. properties are estimated to face some degree of flood risk over the next 30 years, according to First Street.

And identifying where wildfire losses could be similarly widespread makes measuring those losses more consequential. The better researchers understand where homes are being destroyed—and under what conditions—the better communities can target efforts to prevent the next fire from becoming catastrophic.

Preston says she is grateful “that these data are available, and that so much effort is put into keeping [them] accurate and up to date and usable by everyone.”