Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency posted a short technical notice on July 31 that deserves more attention than a maintenance bulletin normally gets.
The notice said power to the agency's Airway Heights and Colbert monitoring stations "may be temporarily disrupted" the following day because of Avista's Public Safety Power Shutoffs.
That is the agency disclosing, proactively and in its own words, that two of its air monitors could go dark. The reason those shutoffs were happening is the same reason the monitors mattered: extreme fire weather across eastern Washington, which within 48 hours produced the fires now driving hazardous smoke forecasts over the county.
This is not an accusation of failure. There is no indication in the agency's notice that data was lost, and the disclosure itself is the kind of transparency that makes scrutiny possible. But it surfaces a narrow and fair question about infrastructure: whether air monitoring in fire country has the power resilience to keep running through exactly the events it exists to measure.
Shutoffs Occur in Precisely the Wrong Conditions
Public Safety Power Shutoffs are a deliberate tool. Utilities cut power to lines in high-risk areas when hot, dry, windy conditions make ignition from electrical equipment likely. The practice has a sound rationale and has been credited with preventing fires.
The scheduling logic, though, creates an unavoidable overlap. The meteorological criteria that trigger a shutoff, red flag conditions with high winds and low humidity, sit close to the criteria that precede major smoke events. A shutoff is most likely on the days immediately before and during the smoke that follows.
Fixed environmental monitors typically run on grid power. Battery backup and generator capacity vary by station and by agency, and are usually sized for short interruptions rather than multi-day events. That is a budgeting reality across small regional agencies, not a Spokane-specific lapse.
The result is a scheduling problem worth naming plainly. The infrastructure that tells residents whether their air is safe sits on the same grid that gets switched off when fire risk is highest.
Regulatory Monitors Carry the Official Number
Understanding why two stations matter requires knowing how the county's headline AQI is built.
The current air quality figure Spokane Clean Air publishes represents the highest reading of the predominant pollutant among its regulatory monitoring sites. The agency states that it uses data only from regulatory monitors for the overall AQI.
The county also hosts a set of lower-cost sensors added to the network in 2024. Those are explicitly excluded from the official number. The agency's own explanation is that sensors "do not meet performance standards required of monitors used for regulatory decision-making."
Two consequences follow. First, losing a regulatory station does not just remove one dot from a map. If that station happened to be recording the highest reading, its absence could lower the reported countywide figure without the air improving anywhere. Second, the sensor network cannot fill the gap for official reporting purposes, however useful it is for residents checking their own neighborhood.
Spatial resolution is the practical loss. Readings across Spokane County vary dramatically during smoke events. In a mid-July episode, monitors in Spokane proper exceeded 300 while Airway Heights and Medical Lake sat near 147, and parts of south Spokane County recorded far higher figures. A resident deciding whether to keep a child indoors needs the reading near them, not a county average.
Reading Around a Gap
For residents this week, the practical instruction is to cross-reference rather than rely on a single number.
The agency's site-by-site map shows individual monitoring locations and five-day trends for each. AirNow. gov publishes the same regulatory monitor data, and its Fire and Smoke Map adds sensor data alongside it. The two official sites occasionally show slightly different values only because they refresh at different times.
Readings update hourly, posted at 35 minutes past the hour, using the EPA NowCast calculation that weights recent hours more heavily when conditions are changing fast. That delay exists so the agency can quality-check data and remove readings from a malfunctioning instrument before publishing.
Residents using PurpleAir sensors as a supplement should apply the US EPA conversion in the map settings and select the one-hour average to get values comparable to regulatory monitors. Raw PurpleAir readings run high during smoke.
If a nearby monitor shows no current data, the reasonable response is to use the next nearest station and to treat visible conditions as a reason for caution rather than assuming the absence of a number means the absence of a problem.
Questions Worth Asking Locally
This is a narrow accountability question with a narrow set of answers, and Spokane residents are in a position to ask them.
Do the county's regulatory monitoring stations have backup power, and for how many hours. Whether the agency has requested funding for backup power and whether that request was met. Whether Avista's shutoff planning treats air monitoring stations as critical infrastructure the way it treats some other facilities. And whether the agency has a documented protocol for reporting AQI when a station is offline.
None of those questions presumes an answer. The agency disclosed the risk itself, which suggests it is tracking the issue. Spokane Clean Air can be reached at 509-477-4727, and its board of directors meets publicly.
The larger context is that this is not a Spokane problem. Regional air agencies across the West operate monitoring networks on modest budgets in areas where fire seasons now run longer and hotter. If grid-dependent monitors are vulnerable during shutoff events, that vulnerability exists wherever both practices coexist.
MedicalDaily will report on the status of the county's monitoring network and any agency statement about backup power for its stations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the agency disclose? Spokane Clean Air said power to its Airway Heights and Colbert monitoring stations might be temporarily disrupted on August 1 because of utility public safety power shutoffs.
Was air quality data actually lost? The notice described a possible disruption. The agency did not report a confirmed data loss, and this article does not assert one.
Why do shutoffs coincide with smoke? Shutoffs are triggered by hot, dry, windy conditions that raise ignition risk. Those are the same conditions that precede major fire and smoke events.
Does losing one station change the reported AQI? Possibly. The countywide figure reflects the highest reading among regulatory monitors, so removing a station could alter the number without air improving.
Can low-cost sensors fill the gap? Not for official reporting. The agency states that sensors do not meet the performance standards required for regulatory decision-making.
Where should residents check conditions? The agency's site-by-site map and AirNow.gov, both drawing on regulatory monitors, are updated hourly at 35 minutes past the hour.
What should I do if my nearest monitor is offline? Use the next nearest station and err on the side of caution. An absent reading is not evidence that air is clear.
