August 18, 2023 was a Red Flag Warning day, with a weather forecast featuring hot temperatures, low humidity and gusting winds. A Red Flag Warning day is considered to have a high risk of wildfire and unfortunately, that came true for the community of Medical Lake when a small fire grew quickly, devouring everything in its path.
Firefighters and other first responders streamed into the Medical Lake area, even as a second large fire bloomed near Elk in north Spokane County. Emergency crews were quickly overwhelmed as residents fled the advancing flames.
Medical Lake Mayor Terri Cooper spent much of the first few days at the incident command center with fire officials. “I wanted to be there to help,” she said.
Flames narrowly avoided some key areas. “Both the elementary school and the middle school, it went around,” she said. “It was miraculous.”
While no public buildings were lost, a total of 240 homes burned, including 55 homes in the Medical Lake city limits. The west shore of Silver Lake was also hit hard. When the flames finally died down and the damage was discovered, what began was the struggle to recover and rebuild. “My first thought was, what are we going to do?” she said. “What in the world are we going to do to help these people?”
Cooper said she’s spent a lot of time trying to connect residents with whatever resources she could find. Families were assigned a Salvation Army case manager to help them access disaster relief funding. Cooper said the city has gotten about $5 million for asbestos testing, debris removal and smaller expenses like RV winterization for those living in RV’s while they rebuild. “We’ve just started using the money,” she said. “It goes at the speed of government. It doesn’t go at the speed of everything else.”
One of the major tasks was to remove all the burned remains of homes and cars, which were sent to the Graham Road Landfill. “It’s not all ashes,” Cooper said. “It’s chunks of metal, cars, all the concrete is there.”
Local churches, civic groups and non-profit organizations have also stepped up. The local Lions Club put together buckets filled with household cleaning supplies. The nearby Bible Camp, which lost five cabins in the fire, opened up their bath house and kitchen in the immediate aftermath. Redemption Church opened its doors as a resource center.
Medical Lake Mayor Terry Cooper (left) with sister and co-founder of the Re*Imagine Medical Lake non-profit Gerri Johnson (right).
Re*Imagine Medical Lake, which was founded by Cooper and her sister, Gerri Johnson, has been running the town’s Founder’s Day, Fall Festival and Winter Festival events. Cooper stepped down from her leadership position in the organization when she was elected mayor. “Re*Imagine started taking donations,” Cooper said. “They added disaster response to their 501(c)3. We were all building the plane on the way up.”
Cooper would put out calls for volunteers and Re*Imagine would organize the response. “I never have a problem getting volunteers,” Johnson said. “I have the best volunteers ever. We completed tasks week by week. It was like eating an elephant one bite at a time. It was a big elephant.”
Re*Imagine Medical Lake began handing out food, clothing and hygiene products to fire victims. They used cash donations to purchase gift cards for gas and groceries, which is still continuing each month. Johnson said her goal was to try to take away what burden she could from people trying to recover from the fire. “I had people walking through the door and being so blank and they did not know what to do,” she said.
Some of those who lost everything in the fire were used to being among the givers in the community and had difficulty asking for help, Johnson said. “They were so hurt and traumatized,” she said.
Some of the food distributed to affected families came from Four Roots, a sustainable alternative farm that often distributes free food boxes to those in need. At Christmas, the Airway Heights Wal-Mart donated artificial Christmas trees and ornaments for families. A group of quilters made 175 Christmas stockings and 25 quilts.
“The resources we give them, the small things we can provide, it will not make them whole, but it will let them know we care,” Johnson said.
Donations are still coming in. Last month students from East Valley High School and West Valley High School preparing for their annual Golden Throne rivalry Spirit Week game came together to raise almost $4,000 for Re*Imagine Medical Lake to help fire victims. “To know that students did that, that’s incredible,” Johnson said.
One of the biggest issues after the fire was the trees. Thousands of trees had burned and were weakened, but remained standing. They had to be removed for safety reasons. The effort was a collaboration between volunteers, the Department of Natural Resources and Avista Utilities, which removed damaged trees near power lines. The City of Medical Lake also spent an estimated $80,000 removing trees inside the city limits and the city’s public works director spent his own time volunteering to help the effort.
“It was incredibly layered,” Cooper said. “It’s too much for one community. It really brought us together.”
The tree removal effort took nearly two months to complete. Some tree trunks were in good enough shape to be shipped to a local lumber mill and others were shredded. That just left all the tree limbs. “If you think of a football field stacked 15 feet high, that’s how many tree limbs we had,” Cooper said.
During that process Re*Imagine Medical Lake would often feed the volunteer tree removal crews or pay for diesel fuel to run donated equipment. “They did a lot,” Cooper said.
About half of the 55 homeowners inside the city limits who lost homes have applied for permits to rebuild. It’s a slow process and in the meantime, some of the 1,000 people displaced are living with relatives or living in RV’s, Cooper said. Others had to go as far away as Post Falls or north Spokane to find housing. Some people, in addition to losing their homes, lost their home-based businesses.
“It impacted so much of our community,” Johnson said. “It’s been crazy to listen to their individual stories.
Infra-red images of the Gray Fire perimeter identifying the areas impacted by the fire.
Both Johnson and Cooper currently serve in the Spokane Region Long Term Recovery Group, which includes community leaders, public officials and business representatives from both communities damaged by fire that August day. The purpose of the group is to be a liaison between families affected by the fire and government agencies and non-profit organizations.
“I just call it the bridge,” said Cooper, who is the group’s president. “We’re the bridge and the connector.”
The group is making every effort to speed up the recovery process. “This is the largest number of primary residences lost in a wildfire in the state’s history,” Cooper said.
In addition, the City of Medical Lake has been lobbying the state legislature for funding to help in future emergencies. One of the most urgent requests has been for $29 million to extend 4 miles of water and sewer lines to the 230 properties on the west shore of Silver Lake. The area was damaged heavily in the fire and many wells and septic systems were compromised or destroyed.
Though Silver Lake is outside Medical Lake’s city limits, the city benefits when people visit the lake and end up coming into town and spending money in local businesses, Cooper said. The children who live there attend schools in Medical Lake. And the city’s wastewater plant has the capacity to handle the homes in the area. “They’re our neighbors,” Cooper said. “That lake is directly tied to our economic interests.”
Extending the city’s water and sewer lines can help eliminate negative ecological impacts from the failing wells and septic tanks. The $29 million would also pay to improve road access to the area and provide the infrastructure to help reduce future fire risk, Cooper said.
“They had three neighborhoods,” she said of Silver Lake’s west shore. “They each had one way in and one way out. That’s a risk. They had no fire hydrants. That’s a risk.”
The state is in the middle of a budget cycle and isn’t really approving new projects right now, but Cooper said she asked for at least $10 million this year so the city can get started. “There’s an urgency,” she said. “We need probably $5 million to get the fine, shovel-ready engineering done.”
The two dozen legislators she talked to recently in Olympia were receptive to the idea. She brought along letters of support from Spokane County and Spokane County Fire District 3 to bolster her request.
The city would also like to raise $33 million to build temporary housing. It’s a less urgent matter because those currently displaced have already found places to live, but it would help in the future, Cooper said. The idea is to build 55 cottages on the west shore of Medical Lake near Waterfront Park that could be used as temporary housing during natural disasters and then rented out when not needed as temporary housing.
Cooper said she expects it to take time to get the funding for this project and the city will be looking for state and federal grants.
She’s also been supporting House Bill 1899, which would allow those rebuilding to rebuild to current building codes. The state’s new energy code is set to take effect in March, which would require different building materials and energy efficient materials in addition to banning natural gas furnaces. The bill would carve out an exception for only those homeowners affected by the Spokane County fires to apply for a building permit after March but be exempt from the expensive requirements in the energy code, Cooper said.
