22 minutes agoShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleBrandon Drenon
Amy Mulligan was in her backyard, listening to an audiobook while getting ready to host a five-year-old’s birthday party the next day when she caught the faint smell of smoke.
Living in Spokane, Washington, an area prone to wildfires, she wasn’t alarmed.
She went to the deck of her home and spotted black smoke in the distance. But a quick check of the alerts on her phone showed nothing.
“I guess they must have it contained,” she thought.
Minutes later, her brother-in-law arrived with the news that a nearby neighbourhood was being evacuated.
When Mulligan stepped outside again, the fire no longer seemed distant.
“We saw neighbours, you know, peeling out, driving away, yelling, ‘We gotta go! We gotta go,’” she recalled, adding that the smoke was “coming up over the backside of our house”.
“That activity started to really scare me because that was different than in the past,” she said.
Amy MulliganMulligan, her husband, and their two children grabbed a few belongings, jumped in the car and drove off.
Stuck in traffic along the way, their nine-year-old daughter began to panic.
“She was starting to hyperventilate and crying, saying, ‘The fire’s right there! The fire’s right there,’” Mulligan recalled.
“We were just like trying to do breathing exercises with her in the car as we were driving out because she was having a really hard time.”
The family eventually made it to safety.
So far, no deaths have been reported from the three wildfires that have scorched more than 10,000 acres in the Spokane area since erupting over the weekend, destroying hundreds of buildings.
The fires, including the Old Trails fire that engulfed Mulligan’s home, were still burning as of Tuesday afternoon, according to the state’s wildfire tracker.
A suspect has been arrested on suspicion of arson over the Old Trial fire, the largest of the wildfires that has forced more than 60,000 people to evacuate.
James Main and his wife were among those forced to flee.
“We had no warning, by the way, zero warning,” Main said. “Normally, things would come on your phone and say, ‘Hey, this area, you know, you’ve got fire, level three fire, or anything. There was zero warning for this whole deal.”
Main says he only had 30 minutes between first seeing the fire and realising – “This is not going good at all”.
As he prepared his exit, a “weird” feeling rushed over him.
“I kind of froze up for just a few minutes. I think it was like an anxiety attack,” the 67-year-old said. “I’ve never had one before, but I think I had one then.”
Main and his wife made it to their truck, but as they tried to escape, they had to navigate streets shrouded in thick, dark smoke.
“We don’t know if we’re heading out of a fire or into a fire because we can’t freaking see,” he recalled.
James MainWhen Main returned on Sunday to survey the damage, he found little left of his house beyond ash, rubble and charred tree trunks rising from smouldering ground.
Asked what come next, Main responded: “We don’t know.”
It’s a question Main, and countless others, will be grappling with in the days and weeks ahead as they try to rebuild their lives.
More than 700 homes and other buildings have been destroyed by the Spokane-area fires. Among them is Amy Mulligan’s home.
“It’s all just ash,” she said, describing what remained of her home, supported by photos she shared with the BBC.
But it wasn’t the house itself that brought her to tears.
It was the things inside – the ones insurance checks can’t replace. The ones official government trackers don’t tally. Like the ring Mulligan’s grandmother gave her after receiving it from Mulligan’s grandfather on their 49th wedding anniversary.
“She was confused why he didn’t just wait and do the big thing on the 50th, but he passed away that year,” Mulligan said.
“She had always said she thought that he knew, and that’s why he went ahead and got her this ring. And she had given it to me,” she continued, taking a long pause, fighting to hold back the tears.
“And it’s gone.”
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