Last year, Chris Matthews was forced to flee with his family of five after a brushfire threatened their home in Spokane, Washington.
That evacuation lasted only a few hours. So when an ominous column of dark smoke raced towards him last Saturday, and he and his family were evacuated again, he expected he’d be back home soon.
Instead, he returned to find nothing but smouldering ruins.
“All of us thought we were going to be able to get back to our houses,” he recalls. “And we didn’t think it’d be a situation where we were going to lose our homes or anything like that.”
Smoke and fires are a normal occurrence here in the US Pacific Northwest every summer, as residents wait for the autumn rains to arrive. Small evacuations are not unexpected. But the scale of this year’s fires in Spokane is unprecedented.
Kira Townsend, 39, says she realised the immense danger when word came that the fire had jumped over the river, which normally acts as a barrier protecting the city from fires.
“It’s never jumped the river like that, and just roared up the hill that fast,” she says.
Nearly a quarter of the city population – 65,000 people – were forced to evacuate since the fires began. For those whose homes did not burn down, officials say it may be weeks before it is safe to return to their neighbourhoods.
Miraculously, there have been no deaths or major injuries reported from the fires.