When the Gray Fire burned through the city of Medical Lake in August 2023, Sarah Addington was the Spokane Transit Authority supervisor handling radio communications and sending vehicles to evacuate people.
By sheer coincidence nearly three years later — despite that STA staff change shifts and rotate positions — Addington found herself in the same role, at the same desk, when the Old Trails Fire flared up on Aug. 1.
And, this time, Addington had to evacuate her father.
“For her to be the one in the seat when this evacuation started was statistically unlikely, but it happened,” Brandon Rapez-Betty, STA’s chief operations officer, said in a text message to Northwest Public Broadcasting.
Addington’s shift started at 9 a.m. that day. Addington, 33, was working in the dispatch center at STA’s Boone South Garage, where the agency stores its fleet.
At 1:22 p.m., she learned in a private text that a fast-moving fire, which had sparked just before noon, was spreading northwest of the city.
“My first thought was, ‘I wonder if this is going to be very similar’ to Medical Lake,'" she said. “And it was.”
The dispatch center later got a call from the Spokane Police Department: They wanted to evacuate the Mann-Grandstaff Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center on North Assembly Street and needed the STA’s help.
Addington’s 71-year-old father, who served in the U.S. Air Force for 22 years, was in the VA’s intensive care unit receiving treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Addington had visited him earlier that day before her shift started. Now, the Old Trails Fire was heading his way. He and Addington’s mother had been playing Scrabble in his hospital room.
Addington let her father know a bus was coming to get him. She also started getting calls to evacuate other facilities, including elder care homes.
She feared for her father’s safety, not because of the fire, but because of his medical condition. Between work calls — Addington was now managing both the evacuation traffic and the routine traffic, “triaging as I go” — she checked on him.
“I would call him and say, ‘Hey, how are you doing? Where are you?’ And he’d let me know,” she said. “Luckily, I knew the bus number he was on” — 2961 — “so I could track that.” The driver also looked after him, she said, “so that gave me reassurance.”
On one of several monitors before her, Addington watched bus 2961 crawl across the screen in STA’s GPS map system. The 60-foot bus moved at a normal speed, she said, “but it felt slow in the moment, knowing my dad was on it.”
“It sort of just put it into perspective — that it’s not just people we’re getting onto a bus, it’s someone’s dad, grandfather, mother, nurses, doctors, whoever needed to be evacuated in the moment,” she said.
No. 2961 eventually made its way to Shadle Park High School, which became a disaster assistance center. Addington’s father ended up at Sacred Heart Medical Center.
That day, STA buses and paratransit vans evacuated a total of 820 people — 621 by fixed-route buses, 199 by paratransit, including from Spokane Rehab Center, assisted living facilities and retirement communities, group homes and family residences. Two other fires — the Autumn Lane and Fairview fires — erupted that afternoon.
Two weeks later, the Old Trails Fire alone has consumed more than 3,100 acres. Together, the three fires have burned about 10,000 acres and damaged or destroyed over 800 structures, mostly homes. As of Thursday, they were almost fully contained, and a Spokane man has been charged with five counts of first-degree arson. The Autumn Lane and Fairview fires remain under investigation.
But on Aug. 1, Addington didn’t yet know the scope of the disaster. Her regular 10-hour shift went long.
In the evening, she went to the Spokane Convention Center, where the American Red Cross had set up a shelter. She escorted riders off the buses and into the building. Other STA workers did the same.
Many evacuees were frail and had traveled with equipment that indicated complex medical issues. She made sure people had their belongings — “I didn’t want them to lose anything” — and even carried in cats, Addington said.
“There was one lady — I asked her name, and she couldn’t remember her name,” she said. “So I just tried to sit with her until her caregiver was there for a while, helped her put a sweater on. She was cold.”
Addington wanted to be there, she said. “I just tried to treat them like it was my dad.”
She got home around midnight and immediately fell asleep.
STA employees deal with crises every day — accidents involving the buses, car crashes blocking routes, passengers having mental health episodes or assaulting drivers. Rarely does STA have a crisis on the scale of the Gray and Old Trails fires, but agency staff handle them in much the same way, Addington said.
“We know who needs to be where, what resources we need to reach out to call the operators, to hop into buses just at a moment’s notice and head to wherever the emergency is,” Addington said.
She added: “Everyone’s very calm, and there’s no room to lose your mind.”
Rapez-Betty praised her performance under pressure. “You were the centerpiece of everything that day,” she told Addington during their interview with NWPB. “So all of the communication from the regular system, all of the communication from the evacuation vehicles, from the field supervisors and from what was happening in that room. You had to use your sight, your hearing, your thinking, your voice.”
Addington rerouted. “My specific shift that day may have been the center of it, but it is a whole team,” she said.
Her next shift, on Aug. 2, started at 10 a.m. Before she went to work, she visited her father again. He is now at home.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.
Read the audio transcript here.
