This week on Inland Journal:
Each story about someone losing their home to Spokane’s wildfires – or any wildfires, for that matter -- is poignant. Today, we’ll share one with you. Matthew Kincanon will talk with us about realizing what was happening, the process of fleeing and then going back to see what was left. Kincanon wrote about it for FAVS News.
"I could not tell you all that was going through my mind. It was just shock, horror, disbelief and it was just slowly hitting me all at once that I had lost everything. I thought I was keeping it together okay. I hadn't broken down. But it wasn't until I called my fiancee to give her the news. Literally, as soon as I heard her answer, words didn't come out of my mouth. Only a cry of pure anguish and agony. My dad even had to take the phone from me to give the news to my fiancee and also tell her that I was just not available to talk at the moment."
In the second half, we’ll talk about wildfire from a different perspective. How do incident management teams approach the big fires? What’s their strategy? We’ll talk with Dan Trapanese, who is the current incident commander overseeing the effort at the Kaiser Canyon and Modrite fires, two of the largest in eastern Washington.
"We really rely on iocal knowledge, so building those relationships early has been very helpful. Weather, fuel, topography, and potential of where everything's going to spread, that develops a lot of our plan as well. Luckily, we are supported by the National Weather Service with their incident meteorologist. We bring a fire behavior analyst with our team. That helps us determine where we're going and what we're doing, and really what the conditions are that are going to drive a lot of things."
