Avista Corp, the Spokane utility whose service territory the fires of the past four days have burned through, made three filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. One of them is an 8-K devoted entirely to the fires. Another is the company's quarterly report, and it does not mention them.
The 8-K is unambiguous. "On August 1, 2026, multiple fires started in the Spokane, Washington area, within the service territory of Avista Corporation," it says, and — the sentence that matters most to a utility in a wildfire state — "The Company's facilities were not involved in starting any of the fires in the Spokane area." As of the evening of 2 August, it records, the three major fires had "affected over 8,000 acres and destroyed over 600 structures", none were contained, and there was "extensive damage to the Company's transmission and distribution facilities serving West Spokane."
The 10-Q filed the same day carries no subsequent-event disclosure of any of that. Its tagged subsequent events concern a natural gas incident in Rathdrum, Idaho. Nothing in this is necessarily improper — an 8-K is the instrument for exactly this kind of event, and the quarter it reports on ended a month before the fires started — but the pairing is unusual enough to note: the same company, on the same day, told investors in one document about a fire emergency its other document treats as having not happened.
The company's own count also ran ahead of the government's. Avista told investors on Monday that over 600 structures had been destroyed as of Sunday evening, relying partly on agency and news reports. The federal Incident Management Situation Report did not carry a comparable total until Tuesday morning, when the three fires' combined loss reached 660.
The quarterly report does contain a number worth reading alongside the fires. Avista's "wildfire resiliency" regulatory asset — the unrecovered balance of wildfire-plan operating costs that Washington and Idaho regulators have allowed it to defer and later seek back from customers — stood at $35 million on 30 June, against $27 million three months earlier. Both figures are rounded to the nearest million in the filings, so the quarter's increase is somewhere between about $6 million and $10 million.
That build-up is not a premonition, and the company does not present it as one. Avista's own filing attributes the deferrals to wildfires earlier in 2026, and its annual report, published in February, had already guided to roughly $45 million of wildfire capital spending this year. The disclosure is also narrower than it looks: the balance covers deferred operating expenses under an approved regulatory mechanism, not the company's wildfire spending or its exposure to these fires.
It is worth being careful about the series, too. The line item is broken out separately in only five filings since the start of 2023, and it disappears from the annual report covering 2024 and from all three 2025 quarters, so there is no continuous run to plot. What can be said is that the two observations bracketing 2025 are $23 million and $26 million, and that the figure then moved to $27 million and $35 million in the first two quarters of this year.