A gated community ablaze: First look into 14 homes leveled by the Upriver fire

Six houses that sit on North Emerald Lane in the Sandy Ridge gated community are now rubble with only cement foundations and blocks of stone remaining.

Some items burned in the homes are recognizable: fridges, cars , wooden outlines of a house and melted-down garbage bins stuck to the asphalt by each driveway.

Amid the ashy, black remains, the smell of smoke lingers.

The six on Emerald Lane are among 14 homes destroyed Tuesday in the Upriver fire. One person also died in the fire.

“We’re sad about the homes we lost,” Spokane County Fire District 9 Chief Matthew Vinci said on Friday.

The fire came up behind the homes from Camp Sekani, catching on the pine trees behind the houses. Many of the trees’ pine needles behind the homes are now amber, while the tops remain a lush green. The bark traveling up the tree is charred black . For now, many people in the neighborhood are staying away.

The fire was human -caused, according to Washington state Department of Natural Resources spokesperson Ryan Rodruck.

Anjel Tomayko, who has lived in the area for 30 years, stood on the asphalt in front of the rubble shaking her head.

“I’ve never seen flame retardant like this in Spokane. We’ve never had this in Spokane, not to this degree,” she said. “… I’ve never seen the number of fires and home losses I saw last year.”

Tomayko believes it’s going to get worse the more growth is unregulated because new homes put pressure on resources like water.

The homes across the street from the leveled ones have damage too, with shriveled horizontal siding and burnt lawns.

It takes a lot of heat to melt siding like that from across the street, said Department of Natural Resources spokesman Connor Nikkola.

Many of the roofs on homes still standing are reddish pink from the fire retardant dropped during the fire. Specks of it are on the street too. More than 56,000 gallons of flame retardant were dropped to slow the fire, Nikkola said. The homes that caught fire in a cul-de-sac beyond Emerald Lane were set ablaze by hot embers carried by the wind .

The wind made the fire exceptionally dangerous, Vinci said. Around 65 Spokane regional fire engines and 300 local firefighters worked to stop the fire on Tuesday, Vinci said.

“We knew we were going to have 30 to 40 mph sustained winds, which is the worst-case scenario,” Vinci said.

But Rodruck said it’s lucky the blaze didn’t happen in August heat, which would have made the fire hotter and more catastrophic.

“There were a lot of good saves here,” Nikkola said. “It could have been a lot worse, I think.”