SPOKANE, Wash — Three days after the Old Trails Fire caused evacuations in Spokane’s Five Mile Prairie neighborhood, residents remain uncertain whether their homes survived the fire.
Firefighters say it is too dangerous for people to return home because the grass is still smoldering and they say embers could ignite another fire.
Police and the National Guard have blocked off many roads along the perimeter of the neighborhood. However, some residents are desperate to see their homes and are parking on streets next to the roadblocks and walking into the neighborhood.
Spokane County Fire District 9 says crews lined up on the sidewalk adjacent to five mile road and stopped the Old Trails fire from jumping to the other side. The fire burned a big portion of the prairie, but did not jump to homes on Heath, Parkway and Jillian.
The Fire District says they knew that if the fire jumped the prairie and got to even one home on the other side, it would have started a house-to-house fire ignition.
The Fire District confirmed there are some homes on the west side of the prairie on Jodi and Lincoln burned.
Multiple people who evacuated said only one lane was open on Saturday for people to leave, leading to bumper-to-bumper traffic going down the hill with a fire behind them.
“Everyone was trying to come down the hill here. Some people were going this way, some people were going that way. And then we got an update saying ‘GO EASTWARD’. We were going down Lincoln. The fire was coming up behind us, and we were stuck in gridlock,” said Tara Jackson, a woman who lives in the neighborhood.
“When it comes down to it, what do you grab? And, you know, it was pictures of my kids or letters that they wrote because nothing else really matters,” Jackson said.
Currently, authorities are not letting any cars go through the roadblocks.
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