Go Now: How to Prepare for Fire Evacuation

0:01Speaker 1:Also media.

0:14Speaker 2:Not so long ago, I decided to try and avoid another day spent sweating in my non air conditioned office and take some meetings at the local coffee shop. Just as I arrived at one of these, my phone started to go eight ship, as I normally do when I'm talking to someone. I had muted it, but it kept going off enough for me to pull it out as I looked around and everybody else in the coffee shop was doing the same. A fire that had begun in one of the nearby canyons had grown, and our neighborhood has been placed on a level two evacuation warning. If you're not familiar with the levels, think of them as ready, set, go, ready, as one, go, as three. By the time I got home, I could taste smoke in my yard and the warning was at level three. My phone blared notifications saying go now.

0:57Speaker 2:I have a bag for such occasion, so I threw that in my truck, along with a shotgun that long to my grandfather, which I had to find a lock and a case for on my laptop. I paused briefly to make sure my chickens had full water and food tanks and an escape route. And then I went over to my neighbors to make sure they knew what was going on. By the time I got them more squared away, I realized I'd forgotten some things I really couldn't stand to lose. So I went back home. Then I drove to a friend's place. By that evening, the fire was out and I could go home. And I also had an extensive list of things on my phone that I could do better next time. It's a familiar experience to anyone living in North America these days, and I think after the fires in Los Angeles, the idea that they won't let it get to us. It's not as prevalent as it once was. As we will see over the next few weeks of the show, they don't get to decide when and where a fire will burn. With climate change, more often are overstretched and underfunded fire resources seeing fires get away from them. Mostly this means more forest or

1:52Speaker 2:public land burning, but increasingly it also means fires burning structures, homes, even suburbs. I've been smoked out of cat sites socent evacuation notifications half a dozen times the last few years. I appreciate the chance to have a dry run the practice. Every time it's happened, I've learned something about how I could be more prepared, or how I could demor to help folks in my community prepare for the fires or whatever else might impact us. But in no way does that mean I'm ready what I saw a few weeks ago in Spokane to happen to where I live. Indeed, I don't think anyone could be ready for that. In eastern Washington this August, fires struck with such ferocity and frequency that fire resources were stretched to their limit. The state issued a particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a level beyond the usual high alert indicated by a red flag warning.

2:41Speaker 2:But the speed with which existing fires on the Cobal Tribes's Retervation and Spokane Tribes Reservation grew, and with which the fires had struck outside the city of Spokane struck and then grew, caught everyone by surprise. Resources were stretched, and air attack resources were pulled off the fires on the reservations to fight the fires in town then had to set down entirely due to small drone activity. Within a few hours, people in Spokane were getting those same evacuation notices on their phones, and for some of them leaving their homes for the last time. If you're listening outside the USA, this could happen to you. Two the communities I grew up in caught fire that we come writing this, which is mid August twenty twenty sixth if you're listening later in pershal houses just a few yards away from home, to where I pulled wet carpet and wet plasters so we could dry them out from flooding, back when I used to work with my hands, and now catching fire, where once we worried that it would be too wet even in summer, it is now so dry that fires make runs across fields and woods and into people's homes. So hopefully there's something here for everyone.

3:41Speaker 2:So for those of you who hadn't had the chance at to dry run, but who still think the fire could never get into town, I want to offer three fire experiences for you to learn from. In this episode, we're here from people who evacuated and people who hosted and helped with evacuees. Next episode, we're here from Miles Gray, a colleague at I HUT who tragically lost his home in the Los Angeles fires. I hope we can all use their experiences to better take care of each other when the fire or any other disaster comes for us.

4:09Speaker 2:First of all, I want to introduce you to Dan.

4:14Speaker 3:My name is Dan Wilson. I lived in Spokane for around twenty years, and I worked in conservation that brings me all over most of central and eastern Washington into our rural communities and live on the outskirts of Spokane.

4:30Speaker 2:I met Dan when I arrived in Spokane. Despite his own family being evacuated, he spent the day with me filling up a truck and driving supplies out to the Kobal Tribe's reservation, a journey which took several hours imparted due to fire closures of ferries across Lake Roosevelt. But a couple of days before, Dan had been headed in the opposite direction to evacuate his house and his family from a fire which is rapidly pushing towards a home in side city limits. As we drove up and down the banks of the reservoir created by damning the Columbia River, we talked about the fire, the damage, and Dan's experience, and it occurred to me there was a lot that people could learn from it, because I don't think Spokane.

5:05Speaker 2:It's going to be the last city that burns like this. I didn't want to record in the pickup cab, so I called down once he was back home and asked when he first thought the fire could reach his house.

5:15Speaker 3:I went to a community event, to a pow wow about an hour and a half away from my house on a reservation out here, and I was watching pings happen and nothing serious had come up yet that I personally had to be worried about. And right as the pow wow was just kicking off, I got a pang from watch study that said this fire was small at the time, you know, twenty acre or something like that. And I thought to myself, oh, I need to watch that fire, and started planning in my head, thinking about how long it would take me to get back to Spokane, and in my own head, I knew that if that reaches one hundred or one hundred and fifty acres, I need to turn and go home. And that next pain came about five minutes later, and I was half jogging across a parking lot full of cars, getting back to my truck and driving down to Spokane and calling my partner to tell them that they need to get back to the house and start getting things ready.

6:22Speaker 2:Work in conservation gave Dan a perspective on fires that maybe some people lack. I think a lot of folks, especially folks who grew up in cities and in more mainstream US politics, people who see things like the state as a benevolent entity, struggle to process the idea that there are some things that came before the state which the state can't control. But fire is one of those things. Despite the collective might and heroic efforts of firefighters from around the country and indeed the world, and all the technology in tankers and helicopters and flame retardant and massive fire hoses, the fire at Spokane ripped through whole neighborhoods.

6:56Speaker 2:The state didn't get to decide if it came into town. In the end, as the state could do was defend a fire line and use this resources to get people out of their homes and out of the path of the fire.

7:07Speaker 3:I think there is an urban complacency that comes from the state. The state exists, you live in it, You're surrounded by infrastructure and resources, and so even though we live towards the outside edge, there's a reasonable assumption that if something is going to happen, the different aspects of living in a society are readily at your fingertips, and so, yeah, it's not going to reach you or impact you. I think that's a reasonable assumption most people make until they're confronted with the reality that you can't always control those factors.

7:45Speaker 2:Having watched fires burn on the Covid tribes's reservation for several weeks and participate in the mutual aid response, Dan had a very clear idea of what could happen, and when he saw the fire grow, he dashed home. It's easy to forget that we're all living through a crisis. It is our indigenous communities have been surviving a crisis ever since people from Europe first set foot on this continent. As many of us has come to see the state as a less benevolent entity than we once did. I think there's a lot that we can learn from the resilience and strength of these communities. So, having seen the fire around the Cobalt Tribes and Spokan Tribes reservations, Dan new fire could sometimes move a lot quicker than firefighters.

8:22Speaker 2:He also knew that there probably wouldn't be much time, if any, between being told to leave and seeing flames. Certainly among my neighbors, I've noticed an attitude that should you really be at risk, someone's going to come and tell you personally that you need to go. That was not the case when Spokane. Indeed, people were not getting level worn or two warnings to allow them to prepare to evacuate. They were going from no vack status to go now across the city. This isn't any particular failure on the part of the state or the city or the emugency response plan. It's a reflection of how quickly the fires were able to move under those conditions.

8:57Speaker 3:At no point during that day was a level one or level two evacuation notice issued. It was just level three, and then a new block of level three, and then a new block of level three. And so when I got home, I knew that we were not going to get a level one or level two notice. We were going to be in the next block or two of level threes.

9:21Speaker 2:As I said earlier, the state had issued a PDS designation the night before.

9:24Speaker 3:It was the first PDS that had ever been issued in Washington and for fire season up here, and so a lot of us didn't really have an idea of what a PDS means, even as the news talked about it. You know, we understood it was worse than a red flag day, and we've had red flag days up here. The best way most of us understood what a PDS meant was in a comparison to a devastating fire we'd had up here a few years earlier, at the Organ Fire and the Gray Fire, as well as the Palisade Fire in California. When they talked about the PDS in the news up here, they said, this is the same conditions that were on the ground around those fires. So I think myself and a lot of people knew we were at the risk of a really bad day, and we knew that it wouldn't take much if a spark hit.

10:15Speaker 3:It was kind something was going to go bad. I think we all just were hoping it wasn't going to happen, but knowing we really didn't know where it would happen if it did, because it covered such a large portion of the area.

10:29Speaker 2:And so Dan had prepared as best he could. But I'm not sure how it was possible to prepare for something like this fully other than with a moving truck, and even then, where would you go? As I flew into Spokane, I saw numerous other fires burning across the whole of the Pacific Northwest. Still, by hitting the warning, Dan saved himself some time the next day.

10:46Speaker 3:I have most of my personal go bag style clothes and things like that already prepared for camping season and other things, so I can usually grab a bag and be out of the house pretty quickly. But the night before I did start doing a mental inventory of I know where all our files are in the basement, I know what I need to grab if I need to get out of the house quickly, and you know, we've got young kids. And I'd even talk to my wife and we didn't have the bags as prepped as I would say I wanted, but we knew what we needed to grab if we had to go the next day.

11:24Speaker 2:It's by his BET's effort. Evacuating his house facing up to the fact that he might never come back to it was far from easy.

11:29Speaker 3:I had to have a conversation with my wife at one point when the kids were in the other room, and kids are a whole different aspect of this, where you know she was grabbing some things, and I had to talk to her and say, really sternly and empathetically, I hope you need to be grabbing things like you might not come back to this house. That's the priority of the things you need to grab. And I think that's when it clicked for her. And it helped me saying that, because it really clicked for me on the you know, handful of things, things that were really important to me besides our basic needs, they got thrown in the truck of you know, airloom possessions. You know, you might only have time to grab one. It's not every airloom, it's the closest one at hand that you can think of.

12:14Speaker 2:In that moment, a stand left. He saw some of his neighbors still hadn't packed up. I don't want for a second to apportion blame or scorn here. As I said earlier, our whole political system rests on this Hobbsyan notion that we give up some of our freedom to the state, and in turn we get some safety and protection the full might of the federal government, albeit a federal apparatus. That it's somewhat diminishing to the richest man in the world, thinking it would be funny to fire.

12:38Speaker 2:Forest service staff, who make very little money maintaining our resources, was marshaled to fight these fires, and thinking of the government won't let the fire get into suburban neighborhoods is entirely reasonable inside that worldview.

12:49Speaker 3:Friends of ours who had kids that go to school night kids were out in their front yard watching the smoke down the hill, watching the planes starting to come in. All you could do is pull over and say, you know, are you planning to go oh? And they're oh, I don't know, because an evacuation level hadn't reached us yet. And I said, well, I'm going home to get my family ready. You should, You should think about getting ready right now. We're going to get evacuated.

13:14Speaker 2:But soon as people realized her risk, they began to leave in huge numbers, which, your course, resulted in pretty gridlock traffic.

13:20Speaker 3:The traffic it took us about four hours to make it forty miles north of our house because of how much the reduced traffic happened. As the fire burned all the other routes out of our neighborhood and another fire started closing.

13:34Speaker 2:In, some people had to abandon their cars altogether, picking up their belongings, and children are fleeing. Hopefully you're not in gridload traffic listening to this, but if you are, now you're stuck in their traffic and listening to these adverts. Leopold, who died from a heart attack while fighting a small grass flyer, once wrote, all ethics so far evolved rests upon a single premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him to also cooperate, perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for the land.

14:22Speaker 2:Ethics simply enlargened the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively the land. I think we need to think about fire not as something that happens to trees and plants and not us, but it is something that happens to the communities in which we are part, especially in towns like Spokane with a huge wildland urban interface and in a time of climate change and reduce government capacity. The way we live with fire in the forest is the way we live with fire at home.

14:51Speaker 2:We can't just stop fire once it gets to city limits. Indeed, I would argue we can't stop fire period. We can, however, choose when and how things burn. But that's a topic for another day. Let's get back to Dan, who is now facing a second fire.

15:05Speaker 3:Our family's evacuation plan has always been to go to my in laws house, which is out in the country a bit. That's always been my emergency plan. And they lost their house in the Autumn Lane fire that was happening at that exact same time, was the second fire to strike that day, and so we were pivoting really rapidly on the move. Here where do we need to go? And I was fortunate I have a friend who lives really far out of town in a rural community that's very fire adapted, and I called him and just said, hey, we don't know where we're going yet, but I'm going to need a place.

15:43Speaker 2:Like thousands of people in Spokane that day, Dan's friend stepped up to help, opening his home to a family who needed place and given them an island of stability a mix of flames and uncertainty. In fact, lots of friends stepped up. This is something I heard from everyone who evacuated, the people who they hadn't heard from in months years reached out. This desired to help has admirable, and we're going to get into how you can help helpfully. But in a stressful time, the volume of notications can get a little bit overwhelming. Fortunately Dan's house survived and he and his family were able to go home. Luckily they avoided the worst of the smoke damage as well.

16:18Speaker 2:I wanted to ask Dam what on reflection he had learned from his nine day evacuation experience and what people had done that really helped.

16:24Speaker 3:We have friends that were like, hey, we can order pizza and have it delivered wherever you're at. Like, just let us know what pizza you want and where you're at, and we'll send you a pizza. I don't think we took anybody up on that, but that's like a real simple solution, honestly, of like, I can just send food to you if you tell me where you wanted. Our kids got pretty cooped up by day four, and we had had some friends up in the area where were staying.

16:47Speaker 3:You said, you know, let us know if we can do anything for you. And I don't want to be an imposition to anybody, and even that person I think was pretty pretty humble. I'm like, we don't know what we can do, but if there's anything we can do, well, Like they lived on a farm, and by day four it was like, can we just like bring our kids to the farm to look at animals and get out of a house and like you know, petagoat or something. I don't think they thought of that in their offer of what can we do? And I didn't know what somebody could do for me until that moment I got to get my kids out of the house. We can't hang out in the smoke down here. What can we do? Oh, they have animals, Let's go out there. So like that was just it was a weird way that people probably didn't think they were going to show up for us, but like maybe a huge improvement on the quality of life for our kids.

17:34Speaker 2:In that moment, he also wanted to reflect on what he had lived.

17:37Speaker 3:The kids were a little nutty without ways to entertain them, which is something that you know, coloring books and crans and things like that, something productive to keep them busy would have been huge for our kids. You know, we were able to go buy those things with just having those you know, I wish I had done a better job of actually having all our files sorted into you know, three or four go folders for our family, one for you know, insurance and those kind of PaperWorks, and also you know, a Manila folder of the documents I want to have or the handful of pictures I want to keep in saying for other members or our family. I didn't do a good job of having that as prepared as I wanted.

18:24Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's about it. Dani also mentioned that if he could have left earlier, he would not only have avoided the traffic, but he also would not have contributed to the traffic and thus helped other people get out faster. Less than two days after being evacuated, Dan and I drove up to Insulin to drop off supplies for the Covial tribes. Obviously, this is an exceptionally kind thing to do, but it also reflects an understanding of how different the state response is to a crisis in a city as opposed to a tribal community, and indeed in any rural community.

18:53Speaker 3:The weekend before that fire, so the Saturday before the Saturday where that fire lit, I had driven out to the calvill tribes reservation to drop off supplies for their fire, because you know, I'm fortunate to get to work in a lot of our rural communities out here, including some of our tribal communities, and they've been you know, dealing with a massive it was already over one hundred thousand acre fire at that point for weeks before it, and we were running supplies from Spokane because who is supporting our tribal friends out here, like what do they need?

19:30Speaker 3:And they're incredibly durable and self sufficient and rallying their own community and also recognizing we've got to bring resources up here because of the resources available for them to draw from, we can bring more from Spokane. And then spokanees on fire. And it's the same thing in that we just sucked all the energy out of the room, all the oxygen out of the room. About fire in Washington State got put on Spokane. And I think it makes sense why some of our rural communities would be like we've been fighting these fires for weeks. There's hundreds of thousand acre fires happening. There is you know, a fire further north off the reservation, two other large fires that have now been going on, but all the attentions on Spokane because there's so many people there in comparison to these rural areas. It's burning into a city. And the reason I say all that is someday there's going to be a bigger fire than the fire in Spokane happening, and nobody's going to pay attention to Spokane. You know, La catches on fire at the same time Spokane is on fire. Spokane's not making it in the CNN news,

20:36Speaker 3:and we need to realize that's the reality of these situations and we have to take care of each other and our own communities too.

20:59Speaker 2:Speaking ofies, I also wanted to get a sense of how it can be to be in a crisis but not also directly impacted by the fires. In my time is Spokane. I also met Hadley, who wears an absolutely wild number of Mutual Aid hats.

21:13Speaker 4:I'm the secretary for NAACP branch. I'm on the board for a local Queer community center, and I'm part of a mutual aid group called Mutual Aid Survival Squad.

21:22Speaker 2:When the fires began, they were not on a path towards at home, so instead of grabbing her reliants and documents, she started trying to organize for the people who were doing that.

21:31Speaker 4:My immediate thing was to like think about my network. So I posted on my personal Facebook page and said, you know, hey, what's likely to happen in the next couple hours is there are going to be a lot of people who need to evacuate. So start immediately by checking on your people and figure out who in your life that might be that needs assistant. And I asked my community to start listing, you know, who could take people, who could take pets, who could do an hour of you know, cell phone charging or a shower, things like that, and just try to build an inventory to know who I could start referring folks to if I had people who needed a safe place or a safe whatever.

22:14Speaker 2:Quickly it became clear that there was a huge amount of goodwill, but it was going to take someone with experience organizing to help herd those cats in a useful direction.

22:21Speaker 4:A lot of people who could, you know, so that you could come hang out here, you could park a trailer here, you could you know, charge things here. It was harder to find folks who had space or the willingness to offer, you know, a room in their home or let someone land with them, and I'm part of a mutual aid group called Mutual Aid Survival Squad, and we've got some like really both great community connected people and some wonderful nerds who I say that very lovingly, who you know, very quickly were making spreadsheets of you know, here's all the businesses that are starting to offer donation sites or you know, open their doors, you know, masks.

22:58Speaker 4:Our group made a list that we could start to refer to really easily, because frankly, it just it's suddenly massively overwhelming how many people want to help, and the main way people wanted to help within like I mean literally two hours before. Most people don't have any idea what they're going back to, and you have piles of donated clothing and furniture like stacking up at different businesses and nonprofits all over town, which is really well meaning, but a little bit disconnected from you know, the timing of the situation.

23:30Speaker 2:Well, her friends organized spread sheets to resources she wanted to help to, and she found it was most effective to offer concrete solutions and stop asking people who are already so overwhelmed to make more choices.

23:41Speaker 4:In my case, one of my friends who was out of town. I just called and I said, hey, like you just moved to level two, Can I just go get your cats?

23:48Speaker 2:You know?

23:49Speaker 4:And she was quiet for a couple seconds and just was like, yes. You know, if I had said, hey, can I do anything? I don't know. We're great friends, but I don't know if she would have felt comfortable just saying, hey, can you drive twenty minutes and wrestle these two cats that you don't know and do the whole thing?

24:07Speaker 2:One thing she began to find something I found all over the world the places people could go when they needed help, but the same places where they went to help other people who needed help. That's what strong communities look like. All of us have times in our lives when we need help. None of us is an island, and all of us have times in our lives when we're able to help other people. When we create systems that allow us to rely on each other, we have someone to rely on what we need help as well.

24:32Speaker 4:So I am like really privileged and spoken to be organizing a lot of different spaces. You know, as folks started to hear, oh, you know, you know somebody who was award recipient at our ENDPACP volunteer appreciation event last year lost their home. As that starts to hear, you know, that community starts to activate around Okay, well, what can we do?

24:51Speaker 2:Where can we out for support?

24:53Speaker 4:I do a lot of organizing with an immigrant community, and we were hearing about folks who were, you know, needing to figure out where to go. Resources weren't translated, you know, not sure whether or not the shelters are going to be safe.

25:04Speaker 2:Who's up?

25:05Speaker 4:You know, the National Guard's getting called in. What does that mean? You know, there's just a lot of confusing information that can also create fear.

25:13Speaker 2:All right, as you might expect, I got some feelings about this. First, we have to be clear about the stakes. I think any hesitation in the face of a fire can cost lives. That is why there is so much in this episode about going when you get a level three warning, if not before, people are going to hesitate if they think National Guard troops manning checkpoints are going to deport them or hurt them, or that those National Guard troops are actually bortec who tend to wear similar camera uniforms. So let's talk a bit about what might cause people to wonder if evacuating or going to a shelter is the safest choice for them. There is sadly a long history of migration enforcement fucking with people at the moment they are at their most vulnerable. In the San Diego two thousand and seven which Creek fires, a Mexican American mixed status family we're accused of taking shelter supplies to resell and handed over to CBP, who deported them, including a US citizen who was two years old. As their own community was hurting as people were reaching out to help each other, CBP stepped in to ruin someone's life.

26:13Speaker 2:Should point out that it was the police who detained them in the first place, not CDP. There's an excellent ACLU report in that fire. Other notable San Diego fuck ups in this report include reverse nine one one calls to evacuate only being in English, the police doing sweeps of the evacuation center to look for people whose ideas were not from evacuated areas, and the Superior Court extending the time someone could be detained without arraignment from forty eight hours to a week, and keeping this rule long after the worst of the fires was gone. San Diego never changes, I guess I hear about this Witch Creek fire all the time. Every time there's a fire and we are worried about people evacuating, this comes up. It was nearly twenty years ago, and it's still stopping people from making the safest choice. So a few days after I got home for Spokane, I wasn't shocked, I guess, but still sad to see CBP posting pictures of their OFOSRT that see Office a Field Operations Special Response Team.

27:14Speaker 2:Think about like a SWAT team responding to another fire in Washington in an area with a large Latino population. Par take a level of ignorance will be quite spectacular to not realize that this would make people afraid to access state resources and assistants, especially when you combine us with the fact that last year in Washington State, the BLM apparently requested assistant from CBP, who detained a contract fire crew and arrested two of its members. Quote. I asked them if his family can say goodbye to him, because they're family and they're just ripping them away, one firefighter told the Seattle Times, and this is what he said.

27:51Speaker 2:You need to get the expletive out of here. I'm going to make you leave. Well, that's why I thought it was going to end this section until I came across an Instagram post of Army National Guard firefighters, or at least what the post claims a National Guard firefighters fighting a fire in Washington posing for a photo with a Rhodesian flag. If you're not familiar with Rhodesia, we call it Zimbabwe now, and it is very amusing that this is happening at a fire. If you know how Rhodesia ended. Rhodesia was the last bastion of white ethno nationalism in Africa. There's no reason why anyone would have that flag other than crass and disgusting racism. It is the same flag that Dylan Ruth chose to adorn his hateful website with when he murdered nine people in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in twenty fifteen. National Guard soldiers, of course, are also manning checkpoints in evacuated communities and people associating them with this kind of disgusting bigotry. It's not going to make people feel safe with those soldiers in their communities. I have contacted several pios over the

28:55Speaker 2:last week. The pios for different fire organizations, for different military organizations. I have left a voicemail for the Washington National Guard PIO three days ago at this point and still not heard back. And I think, I hope, I guess so that gives people a sense of like why this is such a problem. Right, The Washington State National Guard were guarding the checkpoints at the neighborhoods that people had to evacuate. They were deciding who've got to go in and who got to go out, And they were present in those neighborhoods where people couldn't be safe, and they were present on the ways into and out of those neighborhoods, right, And I hope people can see that the fact that the Washington National Guard not only have soldiers, and my understanding is that these soldiers run a little giant fire and not the Spokane Complex fire, but nonetheless, not only do they have soldiers who are so proud of being racist, so proud of being associated with someone who murdered nine people in a church that they bought their flag to wave about it, but that the institution as a whole doesn't think that this bears remarking upon.

29:59Speaker 2:They don't think that this is important enough to merit comment. You can understand perhaps why people might not want to go to them for help. You can understand perhaps how that might have very severe consequences when a fire is coming. So that's where we're at right now. Not only is this happening, but it's happening in a way that the institution doesn't seem concerned about, doesn't seem to think merits remarking upon, let alone condemning. This is why it is important for people to take care of each other, because there are people right now who have very good reasons not to trust the state, and even that at the time when they are most vulnerable, they still can't look to the state for support because the state has failed them anyway, back to Hadley, because when the state does the opposite of helping, we have even more reason to help each other. I arrived in Spokane on Monday, and I was able to find a hotel room. I was kind of shocked. I thought they might all be full.

30:59Speaker 2:I drove by the convict that was sheltering people the next day and I was surprised to find it looked pretty chill. It seemed that rather than leaning on the state, the one third of people living in Spokane who were evacuated leaned on each other.

31:11Speaker 4:Sixty five thousand people had to evacuate. I would love to actually figure out and map where everybody went, because it's shocking to me that that many folks were absorbed kind of by our community. I think it's a beautiful thing. My understanding is the height of the shelter capacity was only about four hundred. All of the hotels were full, so that means most people found a friend or found a family member someone who was able to take them.

31:36Speaker 2:That's remarkable, and it meant that the people who most needed help from the state or NGOs or even needed hotels could still get that help.

31:45Speaker 4:I was really encouraging folks that if you had a place to go, if you had a family member or friend to go to, even though if you were telling yourself, I'm going to be a burden, I don't want to annoy folks. I don't want to bother people do it, because you might actually be fraying a hotel room or an AIRNB space for someone who does not have a community to hold them in and shelter them in last time.

32:04Speaker 2:And I think that's where I want to end this week with a reflection on how letting people help us helps us build a world where people can get help when they need it. This happens on a big scale and on a small scale, in cities of two hundred thousand people like Spokane, and in tiny rural communities. As our federal government is stripped for parts, climate change increases and the gap between the rich and the rest of us grows even bigger. We are going to face more and more crises and get less and less help. We need to build communities where that's okay, because we can rely on each other in the short term and in the long term. And that's what I want to talk about next week. The long term. What it looks like a year and a half later, when you're still out of your house and you're trying to move on with your life as a state, and the giant corporation that caused the fire that burned down your home don't show up to help you.

32:53Speaker 5:Rebuild natural causes the production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cooalzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for natural causes listed directly in episode descriptions.

33:13Speaker 2:Thanks for listening.