SPOKANE, Wash. – “It was huge, it was a huge fire. Very traumatic,” Megan Bryan said after she walked outside on Nov. 1 at 1 a.m. to find an RV, parked illegally in front of her house, on fire with close to forty foot flames.
Making things worse for her, she says the fire was the result of a trailer that’d been parked illegally in her neighborhood, one she’d been watching anxiously for days, “I was really like, wow, let’s hope nothing happens.”
Bryan said before the fire, she had called law enforcement and code enforcement. She says law enforcement arrived before the fire and asked the owner to leave just a few hours before the trailer burst into flames. When the trailer did catch fire, Bryan figured the one positive thing was that it would finally be moved, but it wasn’t.
“When you see something just being left there, and not knowing what’s happening with it, you feel like people don’t care,” said Bryan.
Six days after the fire, on Nov. 7, the city cleared the trailer.
Heather Sweet, the Director of Customer Experience, and Luis Garcia, Director of Code Enforcement and Parking Services, from the City of Spokane, said they have always had a high volume of complaints submitted outside of the downtown core, added based on their resources and this case’s safety sensitivity the turnaround was standard.
“It wasn’t an unreasonable duration for the response because the Spokane Police Department Parking Services team did respond to it rather swiftly,” said Garcia.
Sweet added that even if you have filed a claim, they haven’t responded to you can update your case, “if conditions change, give us a call or report it again, because we can update the existing case or help get the information over to the parking enforcement teams to make sure it gets the appropriate prior authorization when necessary.”
But, for Bryan and the residents who live in the neighborhood, although they are relieved the RV has been moved, their experience is part of the bigger picture, “I worry because there are so many more people that are in the same situation dealing with something similar in their neighborhood. I have major concerns for how the city is going to deal with this moving forward.”
