GoKawiilBetsy Robertson was standing in the center of the Spokane Convention Center on Monday afternoon, but she wasn’t there for a gala or a conference. Instead, the event space in the middle of Washington state’s second-largest city had been transformed into a Red Cross emergency shelter as a trio of wildfires, just a few miles away, burned down entire neighborhoods.
Nurses and volunteers were moving between the rows of cots around Robertson, making sure that the hundreds of evacuees—from the mothers with their babies to the elderly with their caretakers—had blankets and enough to eat. Just outside, the air was noxious with smoke “thick enough to burn your eyes,” she said.
Robertson, a communications director for the Red Cross, is from Washington and has been with the organization for 10 years. She has seen communities devastated by wildfires before. But never like this.
“The scale of homes destroyed and lives changed forever—this is a new level,” she said. “We are bracing ourselves for seasons like this getting worse and worse, and starting earlier and going later.”
A historically dry winter, extreme drought, and heat waves set the stage for the hundreds of wildfires that have burned across the Pacific Northwest this summer. Dozens of large ones have broken out in the past week alone. Though it’s still early in the fire season, Oregon recently broke its annual record for acreage burned with nearly 2 million acres scorched.
Washington is also in the middle of its most destructive season on record, with more than half a million acres burned and at least 65,000 residents ordered to evacuate across the state. The three large fires that started on Saturday around Spokane had destroyed more than 700 buildings by Monday afternoon.
“I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around how we’re going to house all these folks,” said Kitty Klitzke, a member of the Spokane City Council representing a hard-hit area where two fires were burning on Tuesday morning. Many of the people displaced by the fires in Spokane are senior citizens and their caretakers. “It’s a miracle that, so far, we know of no fatalities and no reported missing people,” Klitzke said.
A woman and her daughter wait for news on the status of their home at a Red Cross evacuation center in Spokane, Washington, on August 4, 2026. Photograph: Josh Edelson/Getty Images
As the planet heats up, the conditions that fuel extreme wildfires are becoming more common. A warmer atmosphere can hold about 7 percent more water vapor for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, drawing more moisture from soils and vegetation and leaving forests and grasslands primed to burn. That dynamic also causes rain to fall more intensely but less frequently, leading to long periods of drought.