Three Fires Controlled In Spokane County

Firefighters used shovels, bulldozers and aircraft to fight several small fires that threatened Spokane County homes Monday afternoon.

The largest fire burned 10 acres, starting shortly after noon in a wheat field north of the Spokane Valley and spreading uphill into timber. Bulldozers cut a line between the fire and farm houses on the Peone Prairie.

Another fire, along the ElkMilan Road, burned about 1 acres before firefighters stopped it a few hundred feet from a mobile home.

As soon as the Elk-Milan fire was controlled, firefighters from the state Department of Natural Resources left it to local firefighters and rushed to yet another fire, near the Valley’s Northwood subdivision. The third blaze burned less than an acre.

Cause of the two small fires was not known. Firefighters said they believed a wheat combine started the Peone Prairie fire.

Spokane County sheriff’s deputies closed Peone Road near the fire, and turned away many wellintentioned but unprepared volunteers. Some were dressed in tennis shoes and T-shirts.

“It’s kind of the law of the land that when there’s a fire, you drop what you’re doing and go” to help, said Ray “Skip” Mayther.

Mayther put a sprinkler on his roof, about two miles from the fire, before heading to a neighbor’s house about a mile uphill from the blaze. Some District 9 firefighters were gathered there in case the fire topped the hill.

A DNR airplane repeatedly made the 20-minute round trip from Long Lake, where it scooped up water, to Peone Prairie, where it dumped its load.

The same plane was used on the Northwood fire an hour later.

The fire danger “is just unbelievable,” said Capt. Mike Ellsworth of Spokane County Fire District 4. “You walk in the woods and it pops and it crackles.”

But some county residents still aren’t taking the danger seriously, he said.

“We’ve got people with burning barrels and kids with campfires. I guess they just don’t understand.”