By Steve Gorman
Aug 9 (Reuters) - Many evacuees among the tens of thousands forced to flee a cluster of wildfires near Spokane, Washington, were allowed back to their homes on Sunday as firefighters stepped up efforts to extinguish the remaining hot spots.
Despite another round of hot, dry weather over the weekend, nearly 1,700 firefighters managed to prevent further spread of flames from three blazes that erupted on the outskirts of the state's second-most populous city on August 1, officials said.
As of Sunday, those fires had scorched 10,000 acres (4,047 hectares) and destroyed or heavily damaged more than 900 homes in and around Spokane. At the height of the conflagration, as many as 64,000 residents were under evacuation orders as wind-driven flames engulfed neighborhoods and kept firefighters on the defensive.
No serious injuries or fatalities have been reported.
For several days, the Spokane-area fires ranked as the top firefighting priority in the U.S. as a whole, including the drought-parched Pacific Northwest, where dozens of wildfires have burned for weeks, belching smoke and soot across a wide region.
North of the U.S.-Canadian border, a separate wildfire burned more than 10,300 hectares in a wine-producing region of British Columbia over the weekend, officials said. A state of emergency was declared in the Canadian province and about 18,000 people were ordered to evacuate as towering walls of flame devoured homes and other properties.
In Washington, firefighting mop-up operations continued on Sunday, with crews starting to focus on tamping down hot spots in the smoldering ruins of neighborhoods hardest hit, fire officials said. Communities in the heart of the fire zones will remain off-limits to residents indefinitely until authorities can ensure conditions are safe.
But roads were reopened and evacuation orders lifted in communities beyond the immediate footprint of the fires, allowing people displaced from those areas to return home, Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels said at a Sunday afternoon news conference.
"People have been out of their homes for over a week now. That's a long time," Nowels said. "And I know there's a lot of people who aren't sure if they have a home to come home to, or if their home is standing whether they'll be able to inhabit it anytime soon."
The cause of the Spokane-area fires remains under investigation, though a local resident, Aaron Farinacci, 37, was arrested last Tuesday and charged with arson in connection with one of the blazes.
A judge has ordered that Farinacci, who spent several years in prison on a manslaughter conviction for killing his father in 2010, undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he is competent to stand trial.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Sergio Non and Kate Mayberry)
