Just one day after University of Utah researcher Tom Cova warned that fast-moving wildfires are increasingly capable of overwhelming communities, it happened once again.
On Aug. 1, in Spokane, Washington, a fast-moving fire destroyed hundreds of buildings and forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate.
The devastation was immense. But it could have been much worse. In the days following the fire, fears of mass casualties waned. Everyone initially listed as missing had been accounted for.
For Cova, who has studied wildfire evacuations for more than 30 years, that apparent success was both encouraging and surprising.
“There’s a lot of trauma going on there, of course, with over 600 homes lost, but from a life safety point of view, it's a grand slam,” he said during an interview on Utah Public Radio’s UnDisciplined. “I don’t exactly know how they did that… they must have had some really early warnings, and people were very efficient in leaving their houses. Even with the traffic, people stayed calm.”
Cova and his colleagues have already begun the process of collecting data to study what happened in Spokane as part of a decades-long effort to understand what works best when it comes to evacuating people when fires strike in or near a community.
The Spokane evacuation offers a hopeful contrast to recent fires in which delayed warnings, blocked roads or rapidly spreading flames contributed to deaths. In another fire Cova has studied, for instance, the 2025 Eaton Fire in Los Angeles County, residents in the east Altadena neighborhood received early evacuation warnings and suffered no fatalities. People in West Altadena didn’t get an evacuation order for several more hours — and 19 people died in that community.
That contrast reinforced a lesson that has increasingly shaped Cova’s research: Roads matter, but so does time.
Cova said that while planning and disaster management matter, during a massive fire it is likely that mistakes will be made and unpredictable outcomes are almost certain to happen.
That is why, in his July 31 op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune, Cova emphasized personal preparedness and neighborly assistance alongside the work of firefighters and emergency managers.
He noted that elderly residents are almost always most at risk. “It happens across all sorts of disasters, not just fires, but you know people are looking out for other people,” he said. “Neighbor helping neighbors, neighbors checking on neighbors, that’s what I’m talking about.”
Cova suspects that’s what he and others who are studying the Spokane fires will find. If the initial casualty reports hold, he said, the evacuation may become an important case study in what can go right when a fast-moving wildfire reaches a community.
“It looks like another case where you ask, ‘How did they do that?’” he said.
