Washington: Wildfires raging on the outskirts of Spokane, Washington, for a third day have destroyed at least 700 buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes in and around the state's second-most populous city, officials said on Monday (August 3).
Video filmed by Spokane Valley Fire Department firefighters captured the view from inside a fire engine's cab as flames engulfed a tree and thick smoke billowed around the vehicle as they arrived at the front lines of the wildfires.
The cluster of three blazes ranked as the top firefighting priority in the US as a whole, including the drought-parched Pacific Northwest, where dozens of major wildfires have been burning for weeks, degrading air quality across a wide region.
The Spokane-area fires have scorched more than 8,000 acres since erupting on Saturday (August 1) on the northern fringe of the city, home to about 230,000 residents west of the Rocky Mountain foothills near the Idaho border.
As of Monday, some 64,000 people were under immediate evacuation orders, up from 4,000 a day earlier, according to Benjamin Cossel, a spokesperson for the incident command center. At least 700 structures have gone up in flames, mostly in residential areas, and aerial infrared surveys showed that possibly another 400 buildings, including homes, had been damaged or destroyed, Cossel said.