Today's headlines:
- The National Weather Service says strong winds this weekend could lead to more wildfires and bigger wildfires. We’ll have the warning from a meteorologist.
- The Red Cross has been active in setting up places in Washington for those who are displaced.
- Avista says it may take pre-emptive action to lower the wildfire risk for a few thousand customers in northwest Spokane County.
- We talk with Spokane legislative candidate Alan Nolan, who’s running for a state House seat in the Sixth District.
- Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
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We’ll have one more day of intense heat and some breezy conditions leading into a Saturday that has weather forecasters worried.
National Weather Service meteorologist Daniel Butler says today’s temperatures will reach to the mid-to-upper 90s in many places, including Spokane. Some places, such as Omak and Ritzville, could hit triple digits.
And then there’s the wind. Butler says they’ll be strongest in central and north central Washington, from the Canadian border south to Wenatchee. But they’ll also be steady through most of the region too.
“Definitely want to urge folks to avoid any activities that could cause a spark with these dry and breezy winds that we're expecting Friday,” he said.
Butler says the winds will increase on Saturday, with gusts up to 40 miles an hour in central Washington, as far east as Spokane. But the temperatures will drop a few degrees.
Sunday will bring less wind and slightly cooler temperatures.
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Fire officials are crossing their fingers today that brisk winds won’t lead to more fire starts.
Washington’s largest active fire, Kaiser Canyon in Okanogan and Ferry counties on the Colville Reservation, has now consumed more than 106,000 acres. That’s up more than 20-thousand over the last few days.
Officials say it’s burning north and east. New Level 2 and Level 3 evacuation orders were issued last night. The Okanogan County Emergency Management Facebook page has specifics.
The state of Washington says it will send firefighting crews and air tankers to a new fire in Benton County. The Locust Grove fire began last night in grass and brush. Officials estimate it’s about 750 acres, threatening homes and infrastructure. Level 2 and Level 3 evacuations are in effect.
The Railroad fire, burning on the western edge of Grant County near the border with Kittitas County, has expanded to about 1,400 acres. Level 3 evacuations apply to the residents of the towns of Beverly and Schwana. Seven homes have been damaged.
The Red Cross is among the agencies moving quickly to et up shelters and recruit volunteers to serve people who’ve been evacuated. Gary Davis from KNKX reports this fire season has relief coordinators especially worried.
The Red Cross is partnering with the Colville Tribe to provide shelter and food for evacuees. The relief agency’s Betsy Robertson says the organization is stepping up volunteer recruitment as shelter needs change quickly.
Robertson : “That is the focus that we have right now, going into this last half of the summer, is just increasing our capacity, our people power to open these shelters.”
Robertson says this fire season has already shown our region’s increased volatility because it got an early start.
Robertson : “I can't remember opening wildfire shelters before my daughters got out of school for the year, right? So we were already sheltering before the end of the school year. That's the earliest I can remember.”
She also remembers 2020 when three major fires erupted over the Labor Day weekend on a single day. I’m Gary Davis reporting.
If you’re interested in volunteering with the Red Cross, you can learn more at their website, red-cross-dot-org.
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Avista warns it may turn off the power this weekend in areas at high risk of wildfire.
The utility is eyeing parts of northwest Spokane County. They include Suncrest, Nine Mile Falls, North Indian Trail and the Five Mile Prairie.
Avista says up to 3,400 customers could be affected as part of the power safety power shutoff program. The utility pre-emptively shuts off power if it determines that may keep a potential wildfire from igniting or a burning fire from spreading.
Avista is urging people in those areas to be prepared in case they’re asked to move at a moment’s notice.
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Spokane County’s elections office has mailed supplemental ballots to voters in a Sixth District legislative precinct who received incorrect ballots.
Officials say those ballots did not include the question of whether to create a West Plains aquifer protection district.
The new ballots will have that. The elections office tells voters in that precinct to include both the original ballot and the supplemental ballot.
It’s the third set of incorrect ballots mailed this election cycle, due in part to confusion over political boundaries. Auditor Vicky Dalton says her office will review all district boundary lines after the election.
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Several Spokane legislative candidates on the August ballot have military backgrounds. They include Alan Nolan, a retired Air Force aviator who has served in many places around the world.
Now he and his family are living in Spokane and operating a residential remodeling company. He’s now a candidate for the state legislature in the Sixth District while, at the same time, serving as vice president of the Mead school board.
Alan Nolan: I've been able to do this for the last 2 1/2 years and, honestly, It's been a great experience. We've got great staff. It's great working with the kids and I think we've made a lot of headway on a number of important topics. One of the big things is we were in a financial emergency in 2019, based on some decisions made by the prior board. But we've actually been able to get ourselves back to a balanced budget, thanks to generous support by the voters.
We've also been able to go ahead and bring new curriculum. That doesn't sound like a big deal. But, social studies for the middle school as an example, they hadn't had a new curriculum in well over a decade. When we've gone through and looked for social studies for elementary, we can't identify any curriculum that we've purchased and own. So our teachers have been forced to cobble together a plan that complies with Washington requirements and which is interesting and fun for the students. So it's going to be good to have textbooks that are going to provide those tools for them and also have additional supplemental resources.
I have really enjoyed that. I enjoyed going out and meeting people when I was running in 2023 and it's been a very rewarding experience.
DN: How do you think that experience would help you as a state legislator?
AN: First and foremost, it shows my ability to actually achieve things and I think this is one of the thing that set me apart from my other competitors. I've got a record of success in the military world, in the business world where we've run and grown a successful company, providing good jobs for the last decade, and then also in the school district where I'm working within a government agency with its bureaucratic processes that maybe don't necessarily want to change or take a new direction. We've been able to work with them without creating lots of strife, without focusing on political type issues, but on student issues and actually achieving results.
That's what we should be looking for in the people we send to elected offices. We should be looking for competence. And then it's also good if they can, in addition to telling you what their character is, actually back that up based on actions.
I think that my time on the Mead school board has shown the things that I'm willing to stand for and how that I'm able to do so effectively. We've been able to do stuff where we made headway without making headlines.
DN: What are the things that you're interested mostly in accomplishing?
AN: First and foremost, I think we need to focus on fiscal responsibility. There's an issue there. In the last eight years, the legislature's added over $131 billion in new taxes, but we still have deficits. So it's not an issue that we're lacking revenue. During that same time frame, you look our population has not grown at the same rate as the spending, so it is a spending problem.
You look at other states across the country and you see how there are issues where you can identify fraud or poor use of that. That's a kind of a typical joke that you know the government is not going to spend money well and we all kind of understand that at a gut level. But yet we're continuing to put more and more money into government programs.
I think that we need to be fiscally responsible. We're pulling back the amount of money and the things that we're trying to do with government. There are far better, in many cases, market solutions that make sense for some of the problems that we have and so I would like to, first and foremost, see us be more fiscally responsible.
Alan Nolan is running for the Washington House of Representatives in the Sixth District. He is one of four Republicans and six candidates overall competing for the seat now held by Mike Volz.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting was contributed by Kyrsten Weber, Gary Davis and Doug Nadvornick.
Doug Nadvornick hosts and produces the show.
Web support is provided by Anna Gyure Havlek.
