Washington States Faces Its Worst Fire in Memory

Current conditions: Slow-moving storms are set to pour rain on the American Northeast, drenching New York City • Temperatures in Phoenix are to top 113 degrees Fahrenheit for the next two days before the heat dome starts to ease • Across China, 11 weather stations broke their August hottest records.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Thousands in eastern Washington State ordered to evacuate wildfires

Charred remains of a truck and a home in Spokane's Balboa neighborhood. Erick Doxey / AFP via Getty Images

Washington State officials ordered thousands to evacuate parts of Spokane over the weekend as “home after home caught fire and exploded into flames along with trees” as winds of up to 45 miles per hour fanned a “wall of flames,” according to The Spokesman-Review. Governor Bob Ferguson activated the National Guard to battle against what the newspaper called one of Spokane’s worst natural disasters in history. Major Gen. Gent Welsh, the adjutant general in charge of Washington’s Air and National Guard forces, said the fire conditions eclipsed anything he’d seen in his 38-year career. “When the sun sets and the sun rises, we are going to be in shock,” Welsh said at a news conference. By Sunday, more than 640 homes had been reduced to charred ash. Tom Clemo, the incident commander leading the firefighting effort, said it would take days to assess just how many properties were lost. “Probably the largest, most destructive fire in Washington’s history occurred yesterday afternoon,” he told the paper. The Pacific Northwest has been primed for a big fire since at least last year, as my colleague Jeva Lange, a native daughter of the region, wrote last year.

2. Trump makes ‘draconian’ cuts to Arizona’s water

The Trump administration’s final plan to relieve the drought-parched Colorado River over the next decade puts Arizona first in line to slash its use of the freshwater. The proposal, finalized on Friday, departs from the decades-long rules that traditionally governed how the water was divided between states, according to E&E News. Instead, the Department of the Interior is set to issue smaller plans every two years to decide how the water supply is distributed. “This framework provides the flexibility to respond to changing hydrologic conditions while preserving the opportunity for the Basin States to continue working toward durable, consensus-based solutions,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement. But Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said the plan is filled with “unacceptable options that include the federal government forcing Arizona to take the majority of draconian water cuts.”

3. Elon Musk weighs selling Tesla’s Chinese business

When Tesla entered the Chinese market, billionaire CEO Elon Musk designed the division to be easily separated from the U.S. business in case of geopolitical tensions. Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Musk is exploring a sale of the unit to clear the way for a merger between his electric auto giant and SpaceX, his rocket and satellite enterprise. “Obviously we can’t talk about, you know, combining companies and that kind of thing on earnings calls,” Musk told investors last week. “It [has] got to be done with the appropriate process.” On X, Musk — who has routinely beefed with the nation’s leading financial newspaper — called the story “fake news.” But the timing is notable. As Heatmap contributor Andrew Moseman wrote last month, China — along with Europe — has been fueling a resurgence in Tesla’s sales.

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4. In a bullish sign for coal, a utility outbids a data center developer for an old plant

American Electric Power has outbid a data center developer to buy a coal plant in West Virginia, the Financial Times reported last week. The utility inked a deal to buy the Longview coal plant located along the state’s northern border with Pennsylvania. The name of the data center company was not included in the story, but sources told the reporter Martha Muir it was a “household name” and a “competitive bidding process.” As I told you in June, the Trump administration is betting $850 million on a coal revival. But my colleague Matthew Zeitlin explained last year what the bigger problem is: Even the plants that get funding to stay open keep breaking down.

5. Base Power lands a $13 billion valuation

Base Power, one of the nation’s largest developers of residential battery storage, is raising money on a $13 billion valuation, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. Co-founded by CEO Zach Dell, son of computer magnate Michael Dell, the three-year-old company’s model is to deploy tens of thousands of batteries at homes and tap those units to balance out the grid. “We have so much to do and so much room to grow, and we’re very early in the scope of the opportunity,” Dell said.

THE KICKER

A mining company says it’s found America’s largest deposit of tungsten, a key metal needed for ammunition and weapons production. But NASA is blocking development of the resource in eastern Nevada. The problem, the Financial Times reported, is that “a third of the company’s claim covers a unique region used to track signals beamed to Earth by satellites in space,” cautioning that mining could disrupt the operations.