The Gray Fire, which started last August, is still burning in a tiny patch of ponderosa forest in the hills of Medical Lake, and officials can’t do much about it without doing more damage.
A partly buried pile of debris nestled in a picturesque but hard-to-access stand of ponderosa trees on the campus of the Eastern State Hospital (ESH) was ignited by the blaze, which destroyed hundreds of buildings and killed at least one person last year.
The rubble has smoldered since.
It sits just up the east shore of West Medical Lake and is visible from a fishing pier across the lake.
The pile occupies an area of about 20 feet by 20 feet and is probably interspersed with some hazardous and flammable materials, including bricks, lead-based paint, asbestos and coal, said Tyler Hemstreet, a spokesperson for the Washington Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS), which runs the hospital. He said when the wind blows just right, there’s potential for some nearby residents to catch a whiff of “foul-smelling air.”
But several government agencies, including Spokane County Fire District 3, are actively monitoring the site, and Hemstreet said it does not pose an immediate threat to public health or safety.
The debris was deposited on the site 60 or 70 years ago, before state or federal regulations barred the dumping of such materials, Hemstreet said.
Greg Hafer, the facilities manager at the Medical Lake Complex, the DSHS campus that includes Eastern State Hospital and two other facilities, told RANGE the pile is about 20 feet deep and made of broken slabs of concrete that create air pockets that fuel the burning coal. This makes the smoldering very difficult to stop, Hafer said.
“The fire department has brought water out and dumped it, but it doesn't extinguish the fire because it just doesn't get down to the level that it needs to because the heat turns into steam,” Hafer said.
Firefighters from Spokane Fire District 3 have tried to extinguish the fire twice, once in March and once early this month. Hafer said flames that have occasionally burst from the debris are very small, about “the size of a dinner plate.”
Hafer said he employs about 115 people who do work at the campus’s three facilities, ESH, Lakeland Village and the Pine Lodge Corrections Center. Hafer’s crew, he said, are constantly driving between those facilities on roads from which the site of the rubble is visible, and so any time the smoldering bursts into flame he is immediately notified and can call in firefighters. He also said campus security monitors the site and notifies him if they see any smoke or flames.
“I pretty much get instant notification if it, if it flares up, or if there's smoke coming out,” Hafer said. “They'll let me know right away.”
These crews check the fires several times each day, night and weekend, Hafer said.
But though Hemstreet said the embers do not pose an immediate threat to public health or safety, dealing with the site is going to be an arduous process involving many agencies and likely a lot of money. Currently, DSHS, the City of Medical Lake, the Washington Department of Ecology, the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency, and Spokane County Fire District 3 are all involved in the ongoing monitoring and response to the smoldering pile.
Hemstreet said it’s such a difficult site to manage because it is not close to any road and because of the hazardous materials that are burning inside it.
“The site is really treacherous, and we would need to build a road to get to it,” Hemstreet said. “For us to mitigate it, we also need to hire a highly qualified team that specializes in hazardous material abatement, and any cleanup on this site is expected to take several years.”
An additional difficulty is that, with all the toxic materials in the pile, water — fire’s natural enemy — represents a different kind of environmental hazard.
“You can't pour too much water on it,” Hemstreet said. “We don't want to soak it because we don't want that runoff going into the lake.”
DSHS is trying to get funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cover short-term costs and wants to secure longer-term funding for the site through the legislative budgeting process. But for now, the involved agencies can only watch the rubble and make sure it doesn’t become another conflagration.
