Briefly

Fire near Cheney contained

A fire burned 9 1/2 acres near Cheney on Monday afternoon, according to a dispatcher at the Washington Department of Natural Resources Northeast Dispatch Center. Crews had contained the blaze by late Monday afternoon, but were expected to remain on scene until after sunset to ensure all hot spots had been doused.

The fire burned near the intersection of Anderson Road and the Cheney-Spokane Road. No homes or buildings were damaged by the fire. Its cause was being investigated, the dispatcher said.

No other fires were burning in Spokane County, despite lingering smoke over the skies of Spokane Monday night, a Spokane regional fire dispatcher said.

Several major wildfires were still burning in Washington state however, including the 14,000-acre Pot Peak fires in the Okanogan/Wenatchee National Forest.

Also on Monday, firefighters responded to a half-acre fire in the Dobson Pass area north of Wallace, according to the manager at the Coeur d’Alene Interagency Dispatch Center. The fire was reported at 3 p.m. and its status was not known as of Monday night.

Police to focus on Division Street

The Spokane Police traffic unit will patrol the Division Street corridor this week through Friday.

Officers conducting the emphasis patrol will focus on vehicles speeding and following too closely, said Cpl. Kevin Huddle in a press release.

Vehicles following too closely are the leading cause of collisions in that area of the city, Huddle said.

Drivers should remember to leave at least one car length between cars for a speed of every ten miles per hour. For example, a car traveling 30 mph should be three car lengths behind the car in front of it, Huddle said in the release.

Man charged in Renton hit-run

Seattle A 46-year-old man has been charged with felony hit and run in an Interstate 405 crash that injured another man so severely his legs had to be amputated, the King County prosecutor said Monday.

Timmy Jay Crawford was arrested July 20, two days after a van struck 24-year-old Byron Speer as Speer inspected a flat tire on his pickup truck, parked safely on the side of an I-405 off-ramp in suburban Renton.

Speer, whose legs later had to be amputated above the knee, has been hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Crawford is a transient who frequents the Tacoma-Spanaway area, State Patrol Kelly Spangler said at the time of his arrest.

He was also charged with driving with a suspended license.

Several witnesses described watching Crawford’s van drive directly off the road and into Speer and his truck, prosecutors said in court papers.

Crawford gave responding officers a false name and, after being taken to Valley Medical Center in Renton by ambulance, left the hospital without telling anyone, prosecutors said.

After his arrest in Pierce County, Crawford said he had driven past the collision scene and knew police were looking for him, court papers said.

His driver’s license had been suspended because he is a habitual traffic offender, prosecutors said.

Groups threaten to sue EPA over salmon

Seattle Conservation and fisheries groups gave the government two months’ notice on Monday that they plan to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unless it does a better job gauging the risks various pesticides pose to salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

In a letter sent to EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt, lawyers with the environmental defense firm Earthjustice said the agency failed to use the best available science when it concluded that more than three dozen pesticides either would not harm or would not likely harm threatened and endangered salmon runs.

Earthjustice, which is representing the Washington Toxics Coalition, Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and other groups, cited an April 2004 draft letter from NOAA Fisheries – the federal agency in charge of restoring salmon – saying it did not support EPA’s findings.

“Pesticides are deadly by design and they’ll kill baby salmon after they wash off fields, orchards and lawns into salmon streams,” Earthjustice lawyer Patti Goldman said. “EPA’s job is to regulate their use so they don’t violate the Endangered Species Act, but their own sister agency in the federal government has found them miserably failing at (the) obligation.”

NOAA Fisheries spokesman Brian Gorman stressed that the letter was merely a draft and was never sent to the EPA. He said the fisheries agency is working with the EPA “to determine the safety and proper use of these pesticides.”