Man Arrested for Starting One of the Spokane Fires That Destroyed 700+ Homes

700 Buildings Gone. More to Come.

The numbers are brutal. More than 700 structures have been destroyed across the Spokane area, according to CBS News, with another 400 still unassessed as of Monday. The three fires — the Old Trails Fire, the Fairview Fire, and the Autumn Lane Fire — have together burned roughly 12.5 square miles and remain completely uncontained, fire officials said.

This is not a routine bad fire season. For the Pacific Northwest, CBS News reports this has been one of the worst in three decades. At least 16 major fires are burning across Washington state alone, against the backdrop of severe drought and a historically weak snowpack. The entire state congressional delegation wrote to President Trump on Monday asking him to approve an expedited emergency declaration.

And the worst may still be ahead. Calmer winds and cooler temperatures gave firefighters a brief window early this week, but Daniel Ramey, a spokesperson for the California Interagency Incident Management Team 7, told CBS News that temperatures are expected to climb back into the 90s by Wednesday. "It's really time for us to put in the work," he said. Over 1,000 firefighters have arrived from out of state, with that number expected to double in the coming days.

The Suspect and What We Know

The Spokane County Sheriff's Office says Farinacci was booked specifically in connection with the Old Trails Fire. Beyond the $1 million bond, details remain thin. CBS News notes it was not immediately clear whether he has an attorney who can speak on his behalf.

No motive has been publicly established. No further charges have been announced in connection with the other two fires. Authorities have not said whether they believe those fires were also deliberately set or whether they are treating them as separate incidents. What is clear is that the conditions on Saturday — extreme drought, bone-dry brush, high heat, and high winds — meant that anything lit in the wrong place was going to spread fast and hard. Whether that was ignorance, recklessness, or something worse is apparently what a court will eventually decide.

What People Are Coming Home To

The New York Post spoke to residents who returned Monday to find their homes leveled, some with only chimneys still standing. Miriam Sim, 76, stood with her husband Daniel surveying the ruins of the home they had lived in since 2005. "There's nothing to save," she said. Her husband's question hung in the air: "At our age, do we want to rebuild?"

Angela and Wayde Deatherage had 30 minutes between when they evacuated Saturday afternoon and when their security cameras started sending fire alerts to Angela's phone, according to the New York Post. Wayde drove back that evening, stopped at the end of the street, and called his wife. "Our house is done." They had lived there for nearly 22 years. "It's like our house sunk down in the basement," Angela said Sunday. "There's just so much loss for so many people."

Anna Andreachi told CBS News she lost everything in the blaze, including belongings from her recently deceased father. "All of our memories are gone. My dad just died, and all of his stuff was still in there, too." Friends and family of victims posted online appeals for money, clothes, and basic necessities. About 400 people were sheltering at Spokane's main convention center as of Monday, and the city's public schools opened an emergency drop-in camp for children.

The People Who Fought Back

Not everyone lost. Joe Cvancara and his family dug a fire line around their property and saved their home, CBS News reports. At least eight neighboring homes were not so lucky. "Almost survivor's guilt, in a way," Cvancara said. He told CBS News he and his family plan to open their home to displaced neighbors.

Wayde Deatherage, who lost his own house, propped a hose against a neighbor's property before he left the street on Saturday evening. That house survived. Karen Faggioli, 61, who is currently recovering from breast cancer, learned via a family text that her home and three vehicles were destroyed, along with a daughter's nearby house. "Why cry? What's crying going to do?" she told the New York Post. "We're strong — and now we get all new things. I'm emotionally numb."

That specific flavor of shell-shocked gallows humor keeps appearing in the accounts coming out of Spokane. It is, historically, what people reach for when the alternative is complete collapse.

The 14 Unaccounted For

Spokane County initially received nearly 300 reports of missing people. By Monday, authorities had cleared all but 14, according to both CBS News and the New York Post. Sheriff John Knowles was careful with his language, explicitly refusing to label those 14 as missing. "These are people who may have called for help or for help evacuating, and many of them likely did get evacuated," he told reporters. Poor cell coverage and dead phone batteries in a mass evacuation scenario can account for a lot of silence.

No deaths have been confirmed as of Monday. Given the scale of destruction — hundreds of homes, 67,000 people displaced, fires that jumped roads and rivers — that is something close to a miracle, and one that firefighters going door to door in the early hours deserve significant credit for. Whether that number holds as assessments continue is a different question.

Spokane Is Not Alone

The Spokane fires are the headline, but the West is burning on multiple fronts simultaneously, and that matters for what comes next. In central Utah, a blaze quadrupled in size over the weekend to nearly 109 square miles by Monday afternoon, the New York Post reports. More than 100 cattle have been killed. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for part of Fillmore, a town of about 2,600 people, and inmates at the county jail were transferred out.

In western Idaho and eastern Oregon, a lightning-caused fire has burned over 530 square miles of grassland and is threatening more than 600 homes and 800 other structures, per the New York Post. California has been relatively quiet so far, but Ramey told CBS News that firefighting resources are already stretched thin across the region. The concern is simple: if California ignites while Spokane is still burning and Utah is still burning and Idaho is still burning, there will not be enough people and planes to go around.