SPOKANE, Wash. – While pilots were being ordered to pull their helicopters and aerial tankers out of the fire zone over the weekend, the problem was not weather. Unauthorized drones were occupying the restricted airspace the Federal Aviation Administration had declared over the fires, grounding the aircraft that fire managers depend on most heavily when a blaze is moving at zero percent containment through residential streets.
Fire officials confirmed that unauthorized drone incursions were forcing aerial assets to stand down. FAA temporary flight restrictions designate mandatory no-fly corridors over active wildland fire zones. The restrictions are standard procedure for any significant suppression operation, established specifically to protect pilots in the low-altitude environment of smoke, retardant drops, and helicopter operations where a mid-air collision with a drone moves from a safety risk to a near-certain one. They require compliance. Enforcement in real time, over an active disaster zone, is something an agency cannot deliver in the minutes a drone is in the air.
The drones were one constraint on an operation already fighting on difficult terms. The Old Trails Fire crossed the Spokane River on Saturday afternoon and entered Spokane proper, moving from the city’s western urban edge into residential streets that extend toward the dryland terrain of eastern Washington. By Sunday morning, three fires had charred roughly 5,390 acres across the Spokane area with zero percent containment. The fires had jumped a natural boundary and were now inside a city of roughly 230,000 people.
As the fires moved, so did the evacuation perimeter. Level 3 “Go Now” alerts, the highest emergency designation in Washington state, were issued for swaths of northern Spokane, with mandatory evacuation zones extending north of Mead High School. The expansion pushed the displacement perimeter beyond the western neighborhoods where the fires first ran on Saturday morning into areas that residents had not expected, as of that first morning, to face mandatory orders.
Geoff Beadles, who had left his neighborhood over the weekend, drove back on Sunday to see what remained. “Just driving around looking at the homes,” he said. “It’s just one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen.”
Mayor Lisa Brown, who would describe the fires as the worst natural disaster the region has faced, said Sunday that hundreds of homes and structures had been lost across the three active fronts, with officials still working to calculate the full scope. “We are still assessing the potential for lives to be lost,” Brown said. At the utility level, Avista Corporation reported approximately 10,000 customers without power Sunday evening. Those outages compound the displacement for residents who have evacuated and cannot return to check on homes that may still be standing. Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels reported no confirmed deaths or injuries as of Sunday evening. That number remained provisional. Search operations through burned structures follow initial containment, not precede it, and officials had not confirmed that all displaced residents were accounted for by Sunday night.
Governor Bob Ferguson, who declared the statewide emergency on Saturday and reached President Trump separately to discuss federal resources, cited the fourth consecutive year of drought gripping the Pacific Northwest as a structural cause underlying the fire season. Washington DNR Director David Upthegrove counted fifteen significant fires burning simultaneously across the state, each drawing on suppression resources that are not available in unlimited supply when fifteen fronts are active at once.
The fires had been burning inside a statewide emergency declared by Ferguson on Saturday as record temperatures settled over the Pacific Northwest. The heat dome sitting over the region through the weekend showed no sign of breaking by Sunday evening, which meant the conditions producing the fires were still fully active as the Old Trails Fire continued its run east of the river it had just crossed.
The drone interference, set alongside the geography and the weather and the expanding evacuation map, points to a problem specific to the Spokane response: a suppression operation in which one critical aerial tool was actively removed not by the fire but by people in airspace they were not authorized to occupy. CBS News documented the ongoing suppression challenges and evacuation scope as the fires continued burning across the area.
No drone operators had been publicly identified as of Sunday. No enforcement action had been publicly announced. The containment percentage had not moved from zero. The evacuation orders in northern Spokane had not been lifted. The answers to when any of those things would change were not available Sunday evening.
