Inslee tours Pierce County fire scene, offers cash assistance to burned-out families
Gov. Jay Inslee toured the Sumner Grade Fire on Wednesday and offered help to four families in Bonney Lake and hundreds of others who have lost their homes in wildfires across Washington this week.
Inslee has declared a statewide emergency and said Wednesday the state will provide cash assistance to fire victims.
“We want to help these families who have nothing except the socks they’re wearing and hope that we can help them as fast and as rapidly as humanly possible,” Inslee said in a press conference at Sumner Tapps Highway East and state Route 410.
The Sumner Grade Fire is now estimated to be 800 acres and 20 percent contained as of Wednesday afternoon.
Inslee urged Washington residents to help one another.
“The psychological loss of losing your home is a deep, deep wound,” Inslee said. “It’s not just economics. The people who’ve lost their homes have lost their sense of security and lost their treasures and family memorabilia.”
As Inslee spoke, a Washington National Guard Black Hawk helicopter flew overhead, carrying a bucket of water to the fire.
Low humidity, high temperatures and windy conditions combined in the last few days to create tinder dry conditions.
“That’s extraordinary for Western Washington,” Inslee said. “So we have suffered through a extremely unusual event.”
East Pierce Fire Chief Bud Backer said his crews have been fighting the fire since early Monday morning. Every year, his department sends crews to Eastern Washington to fight wildfires.
The experience “truly paid off” Backer said. Crews used their training to save homes, he said.
However, with so many crews tied up across the state and elsewhere, Backer didn’t have the resources he needed to fight the wildfire as well as other fires.
“So, that has caused us issues with being able to respond to subsequent alarms,” Backer said. A delayed response led to the loss of four mobile homes in an unrelated fire Tuesday, he said.
Backer said he was on state Route 410 Tuesday when the fire jumped the road.
“It was literally like a blowtorch up there,” Backer said. “The flames were horizontal to the ground.”
“Every firefighting entity in Washington state would like to have more resources right now,” Inslee said after Backer spoke.
Inslee called the Sumner Grade Fire just one of several catastrophic Washington state fires.
“In the last couple of days we’ve had over 480,000 acres burned in the state of Washington,” Inslee said. It was a record high with the exception of 2015, he said.
“They are the result of catastrophic and dangerous climatic systems, which have left us exposed to these horrendous fires,” Inslee said. “I do not believe that we should surrender these subdivisions or these houses to climate change exacerbated fires. We should fight the cause of these fires.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
