I. Escape from Silver Lake
On the day of the wildfire, Kaye Peterson witnessed three miracles.
The first miracle was that the campers were late. On a normal Friday, caravans of cars would wind the 40 miles west from Spokane, Washington, to Silver Lake Camp, following a one-way-in, one-way-out road from nearby Medical Lake. Each previous week’s 300 or so campers typically departed by 11 a.m., which gave staff like Peterson — who had left her job as a teacher in a Seattle suburb three years earlier to work as the guest services manager and community chaplain at the historic Bible camp — just a handful of hours to turn over the beds, the lodge, and the cafeteria for the next group of campers to arrive around 2 p.m.
But on August 18, 2023, for the first time in all of Peterson’s years of working at Silver Lake, the incoming group had requested a 3 p.m. check-in time.
Peterson arrived early, nevertheless. “We saw some smoke, but we’re kind of used to seeing smoke,” she told me. “We didn’t pay any attention. We were cleaning up and getting ready — there’s so much to do to get ready for the next camp.” The power went out as the kitchen staff prepped pizzas for the night’s dinner, but the backup generator kicked on and the bustle continued. “But then we could start to see the smoke plume,” on the far side of the lake, Peterson said.
There are thousands of acres of ponderosa pine forests in Spokane County, which are meant to burn at a low intensity every five to 25 years, meaning that smoky skies in August aren’t necessarily cause for alarm. But the region has also been getting drier and hotter by the year; summers in the county are now almost 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they were in the pre-industrial era, heating up at a rate that far outpaces the 0.8 degrees Celsius average in the rest of the country. That rise has led to more intense and more frequent wildfires; Spokane County consistently has the highest number of fires of any region in Washington.
By early afternoon, Silver Lake staffers were complaining about the air quality. One colleague stopped by to let Peterson know that she was leaving early to check on her kid. Meanwhile, the temperature was climbing toward 93 degrees Fahrenheit; the Wednesday prior, it had reached 100 degrees, one degree short of the daily temperature record for Spokane and 14 degrees above average for eastern Washington.
But Peterson, more than anything, noticed the wind, which was blowing in gusts as strong as 20 or 30 miles per hour. As the air quality continued to deteriorate, Terry Andrews, the executive director of Silver Lake Camp and Peterson’s supervisor, told the rest of his staff and volunteers to head home.
“And just about the time he said that, the sheriff came through with the sirens blaring, saying, ‘Leave now, leave now, leave now,’” Peterson said.
The second miracle was the safe. Peterson had moved from Spokane to Silver Lake Camp’s staff housing just two months prior, and she still kept an overnight bag in her car for nights when she visited a friend back in the city and was too tired to make the return trip. But earlier Friday, while helping search the grounds for a missing wallet, she’d decided on a whim to walk back to her house and throw her lock-box with her ID, passport, and other important documents into her car, as well.
Looking back, she isn’t sure what compelled her to do it. Though the sky was just starting to get hazy, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the season, much less cause for alarm. Still, maybe some unconscious part of her picked up on the danger — the smell of nearby smoke; the direction of the wind, which would blow embers across the lake; the preceding week of dry heat.
Peterson, though, calls it God’s wisdom — when she went to evacuate her house after the sheriff’s alert, she already had a de facto go-bag in her car. With just minutes to decide what else to take with her, she had only to reach for her pillow, Bible, and laptop. She never suspected it’d be the last time she’d see her house and the rest of her things.
Peterson began her evacuation, bumping across the two cattle guards leading out of the camp and onto the only road out of the neighborhood. The smoke grew even thicker, reducing her visibility to nearly nothing. Traffic choked the winding S-curves leading back to downtown Medical Lake. Peterson shudders now to think about how much worse the chaos would have been if hundreds of Spokane campers had arrived at the usual check-in time.
By the time she finally made it out of town, Peterson was praying, tears streaming down her face. She passed a vantage point where she could look out to the south and take in the scope of the fire. Although she didn’t know it at the time, she was witnessing the third miracle.
The Gray Fire would ultimately take one life and consume over 10,000 acres and 259 buildings. Only about half a dozen houses on the west side of Silver Lake would make it through the fire, and each of them suffered severe smoke damage. But at Silver Lake Camp, the fire only reached the upper campus, where it destroyed five cabins, two shops, and five staff homes, including Peterson’s and Andrews’. And despite the lower campus cabin windows having been left open during the hasty evacuation, “not one of them had any smoke damage on the inside,” Peterson told me. “No way to explain that.”
II. The Ordinary Extraordinary
About the time Peterson was fleeing the wildfire in Medical Lake, a pile of dried grasses under a tarp spontaneously combusted on a rural gravel lane called East Oregon Road, some 40 miles to the northeast.
While Medical Lake is small, with a population of around 5,000, it is home to a major state psychiatric hospital and an Air Force base, and is a classic example of the wildland-urban interface, attracting Spokanites who want to live closer to nature. But no one would describe Elk, an unincorporated neighborhood along the Little Spokane River, in the foothills of northern Spokane County, as anything other than rural.
“Elk used to be a thriving timber town. There were hotels, bars, brothels — this, that, and the other thing,” Rick Knapp, who’s lived in the community for six years, told me. These days, Elk is “just a white spot on the road.”
Like the Gray Fire in Medical Lake, the Oregon Fire — referred to locally as the Oregon Road Fire — burned hot and fast, fanned by the week’s dry air and the same high winds that billowed the flames on the shores of Silver Lake. Within two hours of the property owner’s reporting the tarp ignition, the fire had already raced through 2,000 acres of surrounding cropland and timber forest. “Leave now” evacuation notices went out to some 8,000 people across the region; over the weekend, the fire would consume almost 11,000 acres, 384 structures, and — like the Gray Fire in Medical Lake — take one life.
The Spokane County fires on August 18 were just two of the 56,580 wildfires that ignited in the U.S. in 2023. You never hear anything about the vast majority of those fires, though. Many burn in remote areas, far from property or infrastructure that can be tallied up in headline-making damages. Most are also small and extinguished quickly; last year, for example, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that “large wildfires” that burned a minimum of 100 acres in timber or 300 acres in grass represented less than 2% of total wildfires in the country.
When it comes to wildfires that impact communities, though, the Gray and Oregon Fires can serve as instructive case studies. Though they were neither small nor insignificant, they failed to garner the kind of national attention — or the outpouring of funding and support — of the fires that haunt the national consciousness, like the deadly Camp Fire in Paradise in 2018 or the 2023 wildfire in Maui, which ignited 10 days before the Spokane County fires. Most national news outlets ran a single story on the two fires, if they covered them at all; ultimately, most of the coverage came from reporters writing for the region’s local newspaper, The Spokesman-Review.
Initially, the Gray and Oregon fires were too small even to qualify for aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forcing many people in Elk and Medical Lake to navigate the recovery without a guide. Terri Cooper, Medical Lake’s mayor, told me that in the absence of an obvious roadmap to follow, she reached out to fellow mayors like Dan Harwood of Malden, Washington, a town that lost 80% of its homes in a 2020 wildfire but had to make do without much help from the federal government.
That is the case for many smaller communities that are affected by wildfires each year. The federal government typically steps in only when fires overwhelm state resources; between 2019 and 2023, Presidents Trump and Biden designated just 13 wildfires as major disasters, limiting access to funding in locales that sustained more minor damage. In 2021, FEMA denied roughly 70% of wildfire survivors’ claims, not counting those it suspected of being fraudulent.
Major catastrophes like the megafire in Paradise and wildfires in densely populated locations such as Lahaina and Los Angeles have taught us much in recent years about how to live with fire. And yet most wildfire-impacted communities will find more in common with the stories of the people of Medical Lake and Elk. It’s for this reason that we’ve decided to highlight the communities as an example of how other neighborhoods and towns can recover from a wildfire — from the initial response by aid groups and local leaders, to the long-term fight for federal funding and insurance payouts, to the look ahead at how to rebuild and prepare for a future that is all but guaranteed to see fire again.
III. Two Fires For the Price of One
Despite the distance between Medical Lake and Elk, media write-ups almost immediately treated the Gray and Oregon fires as a single event. It’s easy to see why: The fires ignited within hours of each other under the same extreme conditions (Medical Lake was in fact under a critical fire danger warning, and local fire chief Cody Rohrbach had told the city council that the 18th would see “the worst fire weather of the year”), and pulled on the same strained firefighting resources.
More critically, though, when Spokane County commissioners declared a state of emergency on Saturday, August 19, they sought funding resources to address both fires together. “It was to everyone’s benefit to count the two fires as one,” Jeanna Swanson, the director of New Hope Resource Center, a faith-based nonprofit and food pantry that serves northern Spokane County, told me. Although each was severe on its own, together the Gray and Oregon fires destroyed 366 homes and 710 structures, resulting in an assessed property value loss of $166 million, making them the worst fire event in Washington State’s history. “We probably wouldn’t have gotten FEMA money, or some of those other dollars” if officials hadn’t treated the fires as a single event, Swanson told me.
The day after she evacuated the Silver Lake camp, Peterson learned from her boss, Andrews, that the fire had destroyed her house. “When it was finally safe to return to the area about five or six days later, Peterson felt an odd sort of lightness. “I was like, ‘Wow, yeah, it did burn to the ground,” she said. “I mean, everything was gone.” She’d lost her entire wardrobe, aside from what she’d packed in her overnight bag, including all her teacher clothes from her previous life. When Samaritan’s Purse reached out to her to offer to sift through the remains of her house, and was there anything she wanted them to look for?, Peterson asked only for her father’s camp whistle from his days working in the Black Hills of South Dakota and a piece of rose quartz from the same region.
As a chaplain, she took naturally — and immediately — to directing community members to available resources, and Silver Lake Camp became a hub for organizing the recovery effort. The local Lowe’s hardware store donated pallets of Gatorade and water, which the camp staff left in the driveway for anyone to take. Silver Lake Camp also opened up its bathrooms to anyone who needed them while sifting through the remains of their homes.
Perhaps most important, though, was the mobile internet that Cooper, Medical Lake’s mayor, brought to the camp. Access to Wi-Fi enabled residents to begin to fill out the necessary forms for insurance and recovery. “You can’t do it on your phone,” Peterson said. “We had a space at the camp if you needed to hop on a laptop, and opened up the property for people to come in and have meetings with, say, their demo guy.”
By the Sunday following the fires, Washington’s then-governor Jay Inslee had issued an emergency proclamation to coordinate the state-level response and mobilize the National Guard. Inslee also treated the fires in Medical Lake and Elk as a single event. But for all the fires’ technical similarities, the circumstances and responses to them couldn’t have been more different.
IV. A Different Lot
“We out here in Elk are a different lot,” Knapp told me when I asked him to describe the differences between Elk and Medical Lake. “I won’t say we’re hillbillies, but I will say that we enjoy and cherish our freedoms, and don’t like to be bothered by governmental agencies, because there’s not a lot of trust in those agencies.”
Many of the people who lost their homes in the Oregon Fire earned below 80% of the median family income for Spokane County. “You’ve got people out here — I’m not saying they’re squatters, I’m just saying they’re living on Grandpa’s property and Grandpa may or may not be still alive,” Knapp went on. “They don’t have a deed that says they are the owners of the property. They never had insurance.”
Even if the residents of Elk had been receptive to outside help, the community is unincorporated, meaning there was no mayor or local government to advocate on its behalf or to coordinate the immediate fire recovery.
But it did have Pastor Jose of the Country Church of the Open Bible.
August 18 was Jose Ng’s wife’s birthday. As Ng recalled to me, he learned about the Oregon Fire from their friends, who left her celebration early to check on their home. “I said, ‘Well, hey, why don’t you bring your stuff down to the church?” Ng said. “That’s kind of how it initially started.”
By Friday evening, as the Oregon Fire grew increasingly severe, more people from Elk began gathering at the church, awaiting news about their homes. Ng invited anyone who’d evacuated to stay the night, and “a handful of people just kind of camped here,” he said. “The next morning, you wake up and you realize that a bunch of these people had lost everything.”
Ng described the population of Elk to me as close-knit, independent, and deeply attached to their land — skeptical of handouts, maybe, but loyal to one another. When people in “rows and rows of cars coming from Spokane” eventually filled the church’s foyer with donations, fire victims felt more comfortable accepting assistance from the church than from an outside group like the Red Cross or Salvation Army. Local restaurants began to reach out to Ng about donating food, and soon larger organizations from across the region began contacting Country Church to offer their assistance.
Unlike wildland-urban interface communities like Medical Lake, which benefit from proximity to major population areas, media attention, and politicians who can advocate on their behalf, rural communities like Elk face unique challenges after wildfires. They have more limited access to disaster and emergency resources, meaning community members must lean even harder on each other.
As is the case with other climate disasters, wildfires disproportionately affect low-income and disenfranchised populations. Shasta County in California has a poverty rate of over 17% — and a FEMA wildfire risk score of more than 99 out of 100. Nearby Lake County and Mendocino County, where the poverty rate exceeds 20%, also have risk scores above 97. (Around half of the people exposed to wildfires in Washington State are also considered socially vulnerable.)
Over half the people who lost their homes in Elk were uninsured, and almost everyone else was underinsured. “Everybody has big chunks of property, but nobody wants to leave their land,” Ng told me. “And so people were staying in their cars or their tents or whatever they could find on their property.” Others moved into RVs and campers that “had mold, and some of them leaked,” Swanson told me.
Despite the entrenched suspicion of outside help, it was clear to community leaders in Elk, including Ng and Knapp, that they’d benefit from the disaster falling under the same umbrella as Medical Lake’s. Elk Strong, a loosely organized community resilience group, soon joined forces with ReImagine Medical Lake, a civic revitalization group that Mayor Terri Cooper had launched 10 years prior with her sister, to create a joint long-term recovery group that would allow both communities access to more funding due to their combined losses.
The first month and a half after a fire are the most critical and intense, Cooper told me. But the true heavy lifting was still ahead. “After about that five-week initial period,” Cooper said, “is when the recovery really begins.”
V. Federal Recovery
Medical Lake and Elk had another good reason for teaming up: They’d seen what happened in Malden.
On Labor Day in 2020, a windstorm knocked a tree branch onto a power line 40 minutes south of Spokane, sparking the 15,000-acre Babb Road Fire. Though nobody died in the fire, between 80% and 85% of the buildings in the small towns of Malden and Pine City burned to the ground.
FEMA funds are contingent upon the president approving a disaster declaration. But despite the near-complete devastation, President Donald Trump allegedly foot-dragged on approving the disaster request from Inslee, a Democrat, due to “personal animosity” between the two, The Spokesman-Review reported at the time. (Trump won Washington’s 5th Congressional District, which includes both Malden and Medical Lake, by 9 points. Inslee did not return a request for comment.) Two weeks after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, he finally approved Inslee’s request for the disaster declaration — but denied an individual request for funding for Malden and Pine City after FEMA determined the damage “was not of such severity and magnitude to warrant the designation.”
FEMA offers both public and individual disaster assistance. Even considered together, the fires in Elk and Medical Lake did not meet FEMA’s $13 million threshold for damages to public infrastructure to qualify for public assistance funding, since most of the damage occurred on individual properties rather than downtown. FEMA’s individual assistance fund, meanwhile, is designed for uninsured and underinsured households, and approval is contingent on the county arduously tallying the number of victims who would qualify. By late September, Spokane County commissioners had managed to identify just 40 damaged homes without insurance — it generally takes several hundred to earn the approval of FEMA — with 200 homes still waiting to be assessed.
Though it doesn’t seem like it should take so long to gather evidence proving the extent of a fire’s damage, survivors have to report their own losses, a daunting, complicated, paperwork-laden process that is often far from mind while someone is reeling from the aftermath of losing everything they owned. Cooper later told Spokane’s KREM2 News that she believed it was a mistake “going to the government first” in pursuit of aid, rather than leaning into the grassroots support that was more immediately available to the towns. (Earlier that August, FEMA approved funds to help Washington specifically with associated firefighting costs.)
In October, about a month and a half after the Oregon fires, Inslee appealed directly to Biden, estimating that it would take $5 billion to address all the damage and seeking the presidential disaster declaration that would free up FEMA funds. Even then, community members had serious doubts about the federal government’s willingness to help. Malden’s experience aside, FEMA’s depleted coffers were a national news story by the fall of 2023. After the fire in Lahaina and Hurricane Idalia, which by September had already run the federal government $325 million in cleanup costs, there were legitimate concerns as to whether there would be enough money left to address the recovery efforts in Elk and Medical Lake, which remained off most Americans’ radars.
It took six months after the fire, until January 2024, for Biden to finally grant Inslee’s disaster request. In response to questions about the long delay, a FEMA spokesperson told me in a statement that “unlike the last administration, [the Department of Homeland Security] and FEMA remain focused on effective, non-political disaster response,” and that the agency will “continue to support Americans impacted by disasters no matter the size or scope of the disaster, or the state or jurisdiction they live in, allowing local governments to lead the response managed by their states.”
VI. Help Can’t Wait
The community leaders in Medical Lake and Elk were not the sort to twiddle their thumbs while waiting for the feds to step in. ReImagine Medical Lake — Cooper’s organization — and Elk Strong swiftly formed the Spokane Regional Long Term Recovery Group, a nonprofit that aimed to coordinate recovery efforts across the two communities. “We went through the whole nine yards to make it official, and we tried to be extremely transparent,” Knapp told me. “We didn’t want to play favorites between Medical Lake and Elk.”
With Cooper as president of the SRLTRG, the group decided that no member of the 12-person board could have lost their home in the fire — a stipulation aimed at ensuring the group’s decisions were unbiased and even-handed. Similarly, the group maintained separate committees — Elk Strong and ReImagine Medical Lake — to ensure both communities received equal attention. Almost immediately, the SRLTRG also began working with the Innovia Foundation, a local community need organization, to distribute financial donations through nonprofits like the Country Church.
One of the highest priorities from the outset was providing housing to survivors, particularly in Elk. Even months after the fire, many were still living in inadequate shelters, potentially exposing themselves to toxins in the rubble of their former homes. But there was an even more immediate concern: the onset of winter.
“RVs are fun in the summertime, but in the wintertime, they’re cold,” Knapp said. “We set up an initiative to help winterize the RVs by putting skirting around them and insulating the water pipes underneath so that they wouldn’t freeze.” The recovery group also worked to restore power to the properties, purchasing meter boxes and digging ditches for the cables.
But much of the work of wildfire recovery happens on paper. “It’s a lot of tracking and helping people get back all their documents,” Cooper told me. “And then, ‘What’s your income status?’ Every funding mechanism has its parameters.”
Insurance, in particular, has presented a significant and persistent challenge for victims, as policyholders are required to supply an itemized list of lost items with details as specific as the size and make of, say, individual sweaters. “It’s so infuriating,” Peterson told me. “In some states, they don’t have to do the list, they just look at the house and go, ‘Yes, total loss.’” California, for instance, is pushing insurers in this direction. Peterson said that putting together her own list was a major stressor because “none of us thought, ‘Oh, I’ll go videotape or take pictures’” when evacuating their homes.
One of the most challenging long-term projects, though, is still the cleanup. In a wildfire, trees don’t necessarily burn entirely to ash; most remain as blackened, standing snags that are susceptible to toppling. (Falling snags are one of the leading causes of fire responder deaths, too, with burned-out trees accounting for as much as 30% of wildland firefighter deaths in a given year.) While the local utility, Avista, removed 5,000 at-risk trees in the Medical Lake area in the months following the Gray Fire, many of the properties in Elk are 20 acres or more, meaning there could be hundreds or thousands of dead snags on one piece of land.
Ng told me there’s an emotional element to the tree removal problem, too. Elk is home to a number of properties that have belonged to families for generations, and while mowing down acres and acres of dead trees is, in many cases, prohibitively expensive, it’s also “almost saying goodbye to a past chapter.” He likened it to deleting a voicemail from a loved one who’s since passed away.
Some people in Elk received new seedlings through a state-run reforestation program, but the funding has since run out. And the state never offered assistance planting the trees, even though many of the recipients were seniors or people who had lost all their tools and equipment in the fire.
Asbestos testing has been another hassle. “You have to get it if you’re going to get any kind of permits to rebuild,” Knapp told me. “You have to verify that you’ve tested and remediated any asbestos that may have been in play when the fire came through, and that’s very expensive.” Costs run between $1,000 and $3,000 for an inspection, and some owners haven’t yet gone to the trouble, meaning there are still toxic piles of rubble that are potentially leaching into Medical Lake’s shallow aquifer.
While Spokane County offers financial support for asbestos testing, Peterson — who struggled to get her own samples run because the local labs were too busy — said the program works on a reimbursement basis. “It’s frustrating to have someone look you in the eye and go ‘You have to get the asbestos testing’ when I just lost everything,” she said. “Now I need to put out how many thousands of dollars to get tested for asbestos? And then wait for reimbursement?” And while Cooper told me that only a small percentage of homes, perhaps 10%, actually tested positive for asbestos in Medical Lake, remediation is “astronomically expensive” — $60,000 to $80,000, in some cases.
Knapp also cited Washington State’s progressive building codes as an obstacle to people returning to their homes. “Out here in Elk, when you build a new house, you’re technically supposed to have an EV charging station,” he told me. “And you can’t use propane for heat anymore, because the tree-huggers say that it’s terrible. Well, that’s what they’ve been heating this house with for the past 50 to 100 years, and now you’re saying if I rebuild, I can’t use propane?” (In 2022, Washington passed a law requiring all new single-family homes to be “electric vehicle ready.” While propane isn’t outright banned, the state raised its building efficiency standards in 2023 so that “only heat pumps can satisfy them” — though, as we’ve covered here at Heatmap, a ban of that law is now being considered by the state’s supreme court.)
VII. Moving On
Sixteen months after the fire, in January 2025, Washington Senator Patty Murray helped to at last secure $44 million in disaster funds for Spokane County from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The hope is that the HUD money will fill in the gaps left by other federal and state grant programs, as well as continue to help the under- and uninsured. But it’s also difficult for fire victims to see the county, nonprofits, and long-term recovery group receive millions in allocations while they themselves haven’t received any direct payments. “People go, ‘Oh, you just raised $100,000, where’s my check?’” Knapp said. “It doesn’t work that way. We don’t write checks to people. There has got to be a need, and we have to actually pay for that need.”
For others, recovery has meant pursuing some form of justice. On September 27, just weeks after the fire, Singleton Schreiber, a national firm specializing in wildfire litigation, filed a lawsuit accusing local utility Inland Power & Light Company of negligence over failing to repair a faulty security light that started the Gray Fire. (A lawyer for Inland Power & Light did not return a request for comment.)
Dan Fruchter, a partner at Singleton Schreiber’s Spokane office, told me that the firm is now representing “hundreds of clients” as part of the Gray Fire litigation. “It’s critically important to represent the individual clients and to make sure that they’re able to recover for the full extent of the harm done by the fire,” he told me. But he sees his role as an attorney as having a second function, too: “Preventing or mitigating the next fire through changes to infrastructure and vegetation management.”
Investigators have traced some of the most devastating fires in the country back to utilities, including the fire in Lahaina, the million-acre Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas, and the Camp Fire in Paradise. (Utility-caused wildfires are not a problem exclusive to the U.S., either; the Black Saturday bush fires in Australia in 2009, which killed over 170 people, were started by a power line.) “The bigger the entity — a utility, a local government, a railroad — the more responsibility they have to protect the communities that they serve,” Fruchter went on. Though the Gray Fire lawsuit is still in its discovery phase, the court has set the current trial date for next January.
In the meantime, now two years after the fires, Elk and Medical Lake continue to rebuild slowly. Cooper received mentorship from other mayors who’d faced fires in their communities and hopes she can give back in the same way to anyone who endures a similar disaster in the future. Since the fires, she’s learned to navigate funding challenges and the importance of organizing a long-term recovery group. “There’s this world of disaster recovery nonprofits and volunteers that you don’t even know are there until it happens to you,” she said.
Cooper also helped Republican State Representative Mike Volz introduce a bipartisan bill during Washington’s 2023-2024 legislative session that would have formalized a long-term recovery program statewide, providing everything from grant assistance to a resource directory for communities to refer to after disasters. In particular, the bill aimed to facilitate a process for long-term recovery groups, such as SRLTRG, to receive government funding. In Cooper’s view, it’s these local recovery groups that have the best success in getting money to the people and causes that need it, but the groups often struggle for grant money because the government doesn’t consider them legitimate. But the bill ultimately died in Washington’s House Rules Committee before it could be put to a vote.
Something has to change, though. There is no standard timeline for wildfire recovery, as every community rebuild is unique; yet, more often than not, the timeline spans years. The Urban Institute found that the average HUD Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery grant, which helps address long-term recovery needs following presidentially declared disasters, takes more than 20 months even to start distributing funds. Paradise, California — which burned six years ago — was still only 33% rebuilt, with less than half the population it had pre-fire, as of March 2025, and its mayor has called its recovery “a 20-year rebuild.”
In the words of a U.S. Forest Service analysis of community recoveries after wildfires, “a few studies indicate that distress can continue several years after wildfires have occurred” — with rates of depression among survivors potentially exceeding 50% and lasting for more than a decade. Ecological recovery can last even longer: In the case of Medical Lake, which was mostly made up of old-growth ponderosa pines, Washington Department of Natural Resources manager Steve Harris has said he expects it to take “at least a century” for a fully developed forest to grow back.
Any way you look at it, it’s a long road ahead. While the Spokane Long Term Recovery Group has helped rebuild eight houses — two in Medical Lake and six in Elk — for people who could not have otherwise returned to their homes, there are at least a dozen others who are still waiting on similar assistance. Insurance remains a persistent problem, too. Per The Seattle Times, insurance companies have declined to renew 161 of the 484 policies in Medical Lake and Elk with payouts exceeding $30,000, and local premiums have also increased. Two years on, there are still 102 open claims of 658 filed.
These, however, are not front-page problems, and it’s easy for the attention of state and federal officials — much less the public — to move on to the next catastrophe. “At first, after a disaster, you have a bunch of resources, a bunch of manpower, a bunch of volunteers,” Ng, the pastor in Elk, told me. “But as it goes on — six months, one year, a year and a half — everybody kind of goes back to doing what they were doing before.”
But fire weather isn’t going away. Washington state is at risk of a “mammoth fire” due to climate change, The New York Times recently reported, and Spokane County remains especially at risk. “You have the fuel load. You have to be ready,” Cooper said of the potential for future fires in Medical Lake. “Because it’s likely going to come again.”
The Syncrude refinery at Mildred Lake in Alberta. Daphné LEMELIN / AFP via Getty Images
