The fire moved fast.
By the time Kendall Steinhardt and her husband evacuated their six children in three cars, the power transformers had already started blowing up in their Indian Trail neighborhood.
But as smoke billowed up to heights of about 80 or 100 feet, she estimated, the family realized they were surrounded by bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of cars as far as the eye could see. Steinhardt recalled her husband “bawling,” afraid for their lives.
“You can look in your rearview mirrors. You can look behind you. All you see is cars driving in, or backed up into the smoke, and then everybody’s at a standstill,” Steinhardt said. “You can see the blue skies, but everybody’s just stopped there as far as you can see.”
When the evacuation order came on August 1, residents fleeing the Indian Trail area didn’t get far before finding themselves trapped — some were stopped within a block of their own driveway by their neighbors’ vehicles.
It took the Steinhardts four and a half hours from the time they left their home to get to Post Falls, Idaho — just 25 miles away — to regroup.
Most of that time was spent stuck on Nine Mile Road, Steinhardt recalled. Planes dropped bright pink fire retardant around them, as evacuees’ cars sat in clouds of smoke. She described it simply: “Just panic.”
“It’s almost like a scene from a movie,” she said. “We were scared that we were going to die there for a moment.”
Growing pains
Some critics say that after years of population growth, the Indian Trail road network in northwest Spokane hasn’t caught up with how many people now depend on it.
The population of the North Indian Trail and Balboa/South Indian Trail neighborhoods has increased an estimated 19% from 2010 to 2015, from roughly 15,700 residents to nearly 18,800, according to a RANGE analysis of state population estimates. That's roughly one and a half times the growth rate of the city of Spokane as a whole over the same period.
There are nearly 7,000 households in the area — nearly all of which drive, according to the 2024 American Community Survey. About three-quarters of those households own two or more vehicles. When the evacuation order went out on August 1, some households — like the Steinhardts — left in multiple cars.
Lisa Yank’s family didn’t wait to see how bad the fire would get. When the emergency alert hit Level 2, they started packing. Once the city declared her home in the Indian Trail neighborhood a Level 3 evacuation zone, Yank, her husband, their 19-year-old son and his friend loaded into the car — along with a dog and a cat — in about 10 minutes.
But traffic soon halted their escape on Comanche Drive, several blocks from Indian Trail Road.
They tried to take a side street, hoping to find a gap, but instead discovered it funneled into the same jam. They had to reverse back into line, where they sat, barely moving, for close to two hours.
During that time, Yank said she wondered if they ought to return to their house.
“But then again, you look to your right and you see the smoke is growing and coming closer,” Yank said.
At several points, she felt that if they had to sit any longer, they’d have to get out of the car and walk. A police officer finally arrived after two hours, she said, and within 15 minutes, traffic began to move. It took another hour after that for Yank’s family to reach her mother’s house near Rogers High School — just over three hours total to travel a few miles.
University of Utah professor Thomas Cova, who has spent nearly three decades studying wildfire evacuations, said that development often outpaces road networks.
“If you just watch all these woody communities over decades, the same evacuation 30 years ago might have been a couple hundred homes,” he said. “Now it’s a couple thousand, and the exits are the same.”
The worst example he’s seen, Cova said, was a community near Conifer, Colorado, where just one exit served roughly 2,000 homes. When he sees a situation like that, he said his focus shifts from evacuation altogether to asking about backup plans instead: ponds, clearings, parking lots or anywhere that could function as a refuge.
The same imbalance is visible in the Indian Trail area, where the population has grown roughly one and a half times faster than the city as a whole.
There’s little economic incentive to stop or slow increased development, according to Cova.
“The list of parties that make money when a house is built is in the thousands — from every screw and every drywaller and every title company,” he said. “The list of people that make money if a house isn’t built is zero.”
Clearing a way out
Field officers, deputies and leadership saw “traffic flow concerns” during evacuations, Spokane Police Department spokesperson Tricia Leming said. They communicated with incident command, which assigned additional resources “without delay” to address the problem while evacuations continued, according to Leming.
Spokane police Capt. Shawn Kendall, who served as the incident commander during the response, said the department shifted into what he called “hasty evac mode” as the fire closed in, deploying more than 120 personnel in teams of four to go door to door and confirm people were leaving.
Officers also found themselves fighting traffic in the other direction. Residents tried to drive back into evacuation zones, even as law enforcement tried to direct people out and allow first responder vehicles in, he said.
“A lot of folks were trying to come home to get pets, loved ones, understandably, medications or valuables, that type of thing,” Kendall said.
Kendall said the police decided to shut down northbound and westbound traffic and just create two lanes heading out of the evacuation zones. Field leadership also worked traffic lights on Francis Avenue, he said, since backups there were affecting flow further upstream. Ultimately, it worked — though it still took time to evacuate over 60,000 people across the fires burning throughout Spokane that day, there were no casualties, Kendall said.
According to him, preplanning for a scenario like this is nearly impossible, since something as small as a shift in wind direction “can change the whole scenario.” In these situations, simplicity and flexibility are “the name of the game," he emphasized.
If this ever happens again, Kendall said he now has strategies that law enforcement can implement earlier in an emergency.
The department becomes involved at the request of law enforcement, which is typically Washington State Patrol, according to Washington State Department of Transportation spokesperson Nicole LaGoo. The department cooperated with local emergency response to set up 11 barricades — on Swenson Road, Assembly Street, Rutter Parkway and Suncrest Drive, she said.
"WSP would be the agency responsible for requesting that we do anything like closing roads, diverting traffic, whatever that may be, for the safety of the public," LaGoo said.
The department will also be conducting an internal debriefing on September 2, LaGoo added. The city, meanwhile, has been working on ways to identify evacuation bottlenecks before another emergency occurs.
The August 1 evacuation was unusual because residents went directly from no evacuation notice to a Level 3 order, rather than first receiving Level 1 and Level 2 warnings, city spokesperson Erin Hut wrote in a statement to RANGE.
“The City’s Emergency Management Department has been working with a modeling software to assess bottlenecks and areas of delay in North Indian Trail,” Hut wrote, adding that they hoped to develop the data into a fire department resource.
The city’s emergency management has also spent the last year conducting evacuation drills with neighborhoods and first responders, according to Hut.
North Indian Trail would have been set for a drill in the spring.
Old concerns revisited
Congestion concerns on Indian Trail aren’t new.
Spokane City Council member Zack Zappone grew up in North Indian Trail and said he’s seen growth in the neighborhood since his childhood — and has heard the concerns about evacuations. He said he has friends and family who evacuated from the area, and has heard stories from people as they were taking “three, four hours trying to get out of Indian Trail or Five Mile.”
In 2024, the City Council approved a Comprehensive Plan Amendment including an Excelsior Wellness development that would see a mixed-use campus of housing, health care and commercial space come to Indian Trail.
However, some residents in the area warned the city that more development on Indian Trail Road could pose traffic congestion concerns.
In an email from 2025 — made public as part of the council’s legislative agenda for the August 26 session — Norberto Leute wrote: “How is traffic congestion going to be handled? There is a very spotty history of poor traffic planning.”
He pointed out that they were at “significant risk of fires,” adding: “Just remember the residential area didn’t burn down by fire, but by wind, which brought in embers.”
On Wednesday night, the council voted unanimously to approve a Development Agreement for five parcels in the Balboa/South Indian Trail neighborhood owned by Excelsior.
A North Indian Trail resident since the 1980s, former journalist Trish Mack spoke in support of the resolution during the legislative session and said that she’s been through two fire evacuations in her neighborhood.
“I have covered many stories — then witnessed them — about the ongoing pleas from us residents to widen the road, along with former Fire Chief(s) Bobby Williams and Brian Schaeffer asking the same,” she said.
She criticized a 1997 lawsuit from late developer Harlan Douglass that she said delayed a widening project for the road. To Mack, the Excelsior development is part of the fix for public safety in the area, and she hopes it will “drop our crime and arson rates,” but the road still needs to be widened.
Zappone also voiced his support for Excelsior’s development.
In his opinion, stopping a development doesn’t change existing concerns around evacuation, and he said Excelsior has participated in discussions about infrastructure concerns on Indian Trail and has “shown up trying to offer solutions on how to address speeding and safety and evacuation.”
He’s heard that police resources were tied up in evacuation efforts, he said.
“There’s also a lot of adult family homes in these neighborhoods, and police officers were literally carrying people from them,” Zappone told RANGE.
According to him, the police, fire and street departments are all doing “internal reflections” about the event. Zappone said he’s asked for those after-action reports to be made public.
Steinhardt and Yank aren’t alone in their families’ stories. Evacuees have filled social media with similar stories, photos and videos of evacuation gridlock in the weeks since.
When Yank went to bed at her mother’s house on the night of August 1, Yank did not know if her house was still standing. She said she’d heard about the Indian Trail neighborhood’s reputation — “one way in and one way out” — without ever really absorbing what that meant.
“That had never really crossed my mind until we got into that situation,” she said.
Methodology Note: Population figures are drawn from Washington Office of Financial Management estimates for four Census tracts covering roughly 97% of the North Indian Trail and Balboa/South Indian Trail areas. Because Census tract and neighborhood boundaries do not align exactly, totals are approximate. Vehicle-ownership figures come from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2020-2024 five-year estimates for the same tracts.
