The Inlander11%
Rebuilding after the Spokane Complex will take time, as past fire recovery shows 42%
By Ted McGregor58%
8/6/2026, 1:30:00 AM
Topics: Fire Recovery, Spokane Complex Fires
Keywords: Spokanefires
BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Confirmation Bias, and Optimism Bias, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 34.7% saturation with 83 hits. Analysis detected 292 faulty-reasoning hits from 239 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 38.6% and a BS Rank of 42% (17,696 of 30,497 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 58.00% of the article peer group.
This very week in 1889, on Aug. 4, the downtown business district of Spokane Falls burned to the ground.
Seattle, Cheney and Ellensburg all had devastating fires that summer, as well.
The Big Burn of 1910 blew through Montana, Idaho and Washington in August of that year, burning Wallace, Idaho, in the process.
Going (a lot) further back, London in 1666 burned over three days in September, destroying 80% of the city.
Although it can seem like a distant platitude when we’re talking about things that happened a century ago, we humans do rebuild after catastrophes.
Spokane Falls changed its name to Spokane, and with help from neighboring cities, by the end of 1890 some 500 new buildings were under construction.
The Davenport Hotel was even launched after the fire as a business that survives to this day.
After the Big Burn, the federal government overhauled the way fires would be fought in the West, and of course London’s St.
Paul’s Cathedral (along with 52 other parish churches) was famously replaced by Sir Christopher Wren after that devastating fire.
Don’t get the wrong idea: Rebuilding is difficult.
They are still wrangling over the rebuilding of Altadena and Pacific Palisades in California, 18 months after their fires.
And it took Wren until 1710 to open his new St.
Paul’s Cathedral, still considered a masterpiece of human achievement.
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Analysis
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