Spokane County Sheriff's detectives booked a 37-year-old man into the county jail on Monday for first-degree arson in connection with the Old Trails fire, the blaze that has destroyed the great majority of the buildings lost around Spokane since Saturday. The sheriff's office named him as Aaron F. Farinacci and described him as a convicted felon; its Major Crimes detectives worked with fire investigators from Washington's Department of Natural Resources, and obtained an arrest warrant and a search warrant through the county prosecutor's office before a warrant service team searched his home on West Elliott Drive. He was arrested without incident. The release does not say the prosecutor has filed charges.
The arrest covers one fire. The same statement says the cause-and-origin investigations into the Autumn Lane and Fairview fires remain active, so the two other fires burning around the city are, on the public record, still of undetermined origin.
The federal Incident Management Situation Report published on Tuesday morning shows where the effort is going, and it is no longer principally to the fire that did the damage. Old Trails had 74 engines assigned on Sunday and has 45 now. Fairview has gone from 19 to two. Autumn Lane has gone from five to 25, and its assigned personnel have risen from 66 on Sunday to 478.
The one-day movement is starker still: against Monday's edition of the same report, Autumn Lane gained 211 people on Tuesday while Old Trails lost 73 and Fairview lost 127. Old Trails is not being abandoned — its overall staffing has risen since Sunday, from 321 to 381, and its crew count from two to five — but the engines, the resource that protects structures, have gone the other way.
Autumn Lane is the reason. It was 900 acres on Sunday and 3,351 on Monday, and it is 5,603 now, having added 2,252 acres in a single day. Old Trails has grown by two acres over the same two days and Fairview by none. Autumn Lane is also the one the report does not expect to contain until 5 September; Old Trails and Fairview are both estimated for 15 August, though those dates are not unusual in themselves — the same table carries September and October containment estimates for a dozen other Northwest fires.
None of the three is contained. Four days in, the report puts all three at zero per cent.
The structure count across the three has gone from 460 on Sunday to 660 on Tuesday, with Old Trails accounting for 550 of them. That figure should be read as a running tally rather than a settled one: the incident management team described it on Sunday as an unconfirmed estimate of at least 600 structures affected across the fire area, and said damage assessment crews had been ordered.
The federal money has moved faster than the fire. FEMA approved a fire management assistance grant for Old Trails on the day Washington asked for it, another for Autumn Lane the same day it was requested — covering Spokane and Stevens counties — and one for Fairview the following day. On Sunday the state requested an emergency declaration and received it on Monday, covering Spokane, Chelan, Ferry, Okanogan, Stevens and Yakima counties along with the Colville, Spokane and Yakama reservations.
All nine of those designations authorise public assistance, the category that reimburses governments for response and infrastructure. None of them authorises individual assistance. That is not evidence of a refusal — FEMA's public files record declarations rather than requests, so they cannot show what Washington may have asked for since — but as the federal record stands today, no declaration covering these fires opens direct aid to the households that lost those 660 buildings.