SEATTLE, WA – Several young kids and their families will never forget the name Lillie Vehling: the college student who saved three girls from drowning during Seafair weekend.

The backstory:

It happened last Friday at Genessee Park when she went to see the Blue Angels. But when she scanned the water, she knew something was wrong.

“There were three girls who were out pretty far by the buoy lane that they had set up, and they did not look very good,” Vehling said. “They were already bobbing up and down trying to get breaths, and one of the girls was actually drowning the others in order to breathe, and that’s when I knew I had to jump in.”

Vehling sprang into action, putting her past lifeguard experience to use and rushing to save the three girls in trouble.

“I first grabbed the girl that was drowning the other two to get her out of the environment so that the other two weren’t even in worse shape, and I removed them one by one. The first girl, again, I don’t really remember how I did it but, got her back to the shallow water.”

Lillie got the second girl to safety and went right for the third girl in the water. At that point, Lillie says she was mostly underwater and appeared unconscious. The girl was also tangled up in the buoy rope, so she had to act quickly.

“Unfortunately by the time I had gotten to the third girl, it was just the top of her head that was there,” Vehling said. “I just saw her black hair in the water barely floating and when I got to her she was unconscious. I lifted her head up out of the water and had my arm underneath her armpit holding her up.”

The last girl coughed up water and regained consciousness. The terrifying incident had a happy ending, thanks to Lillie.

Seafair President Emily Cantrell and her team are making sure Lillie feels appreciated. She was invited to join the Seafair Gala, where they knighted her and made Lillie Seafair royalty.

She also got a special view of the Blue Angels. The UC Davis student is pursuing a career in the Nuclear Navy because of the Blue Angels, as she admires the Navy squadron.

What’s next:

Cantrell said she hopes Lillie will be back at Seafair not as a guest, but as a Blue Angels pilot.

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SEATTLE — As gun violence in Seattle has come to the forefront of the minds of community members, the president of the city council said conversations are “great” with the interim police chief, who completed his first week in the role.

At Stoup Brewing on Capitol Hill, the community group “Circle the Blocks” gathered people to walk around the neighborhood — not for their usual stroll to spot damaged sidewalks, roads, parks, or storefronts — but to honor the hotbed areas of gun violence in recent years.

“Over the last three years, (a shooting) happened 25 times in this small part of the nightlife district,” explained Erin Reinhart, setting up four areas for groups to walk to and discuss the various shootings that have taken place near there.

Reinhart said that after watching the deadly shooting at Bite of Seattle unfold on TV on Sunday, July 26, she thought about how a shooting on Capitol Hill had taken place less than 48 hours prior, and wanted to raise more awareness of the trend.

“We’ve had a lot of gun violence in this neighborhood, and so we have to have extra attention to it,” said Seattle City Council President Joy Hollingsworth, while at the event Thursday.

Hollingsworth was joined by Seattle Police Captain James Britt of the East Precinct on Capitol Hill, City Attorney Erika Evans, and Dr. Amy Barden, the head of the CARE program at Circle the Block’s event.

Organizers said they invited Interim Police Chief Andre Sayles to the event on Thursday morning, and although he did not attend, they said that since he was appointed, he had already touched base with Circle the Blocks about gun violence prevention — an area of work he is very familiar with from his time as the Deputy Chief of Administration and Investigations, which oversees the department’s Gun Violence Reduction Unit.

KOMO News spoke with Hollingsworth about the state of public safety in Capitol Hill — and on Sayles, who has now been in his role for one week.

Hollingsworth previously expressed to KOMO News her reservations about Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to ask former Chief of Police Shon Barnes to step down just days after the Bite of Seattle shooting, calling the decision “irresponsible and it’s a tad bit reckless.”

Hollingsworth said she stands by that quote in regard to the mayor’s timing of her decision, but said her focus now is on finding the strongest candidate to lead the department.

“The mayor and I share the same similarities in terms of what we’re looking for in a police chief to lead this department, and make sure that we’re on the right track,” she said. “I’m not sure what that timeline is, but (the council will) be here willing and ready to participate in whatever way that I think is appropriate for the council, and as well on a search committee,” she added.

READ | Interim police chief vows more officers at events as Seattle urgently searches for chief

Asked whether she had been briefed about the ongoing search for a new candidate, or any new details on the hunt for the third suspect in the shooting, Hollingsworth said she had not.

“I know that Seattle Police Department and the detectives are working incredibly hard,” Hollingsworth said.

More broadly, the councilmember of three years acknowledged the challenges of gang-related violence within the city, not just for its role in the Bite of Seattle shooting, but in Capitol Hill and beyond.

“We’ve seen young folks be a part of some of these groups as young as 12, 13. That is very concerning, and so as we think about city leaders, what are we going to do?” said Hollingsworth. “One thing that we need to start thinking about is how we’re including the families, the communities around some of these young folks, making sure they have resources, they feel supported.”

As for Reinhart, she has many thoughts on the approach to helping Capitol Hill with street outreach and violence.

“I think cameras are a very important part of solving the crime,” she said. “Right now there is a land of no laws; you’re either not apprehended, or if you are apprehended, you’re probably not going to be prosecuted. Specifically up in this neighborhood, I think the cameras would help catch things and deter things,” she said.

KOMO News is still waiting to hear back from the Seattle Police Department after reaching out to ask whether Interim Chief Sayles had a comment on the gun violence in Capitol Hill, as well as questions related to the shooting investigation, and whether he will consider applying for the permanent position of chief.

(TL;DR / “Too Long, Didn’t Read” version: Smoke will clear from Western Washington Thursday evening and night as a stronger marine push blows in and skies look clear of smoke west of the Cascades through the weekend. However, the west wind will return fire weather dangers to Eastern Washington, though not as dire as last weekend.)

The wildfire smoke is on its last hours of hanging around in Western Washington Thursday. But unfortunately, the price to clear the smoke for the west side is increasing the risk that even more fires could start in Central and Eastern Washington to put even more smoke into the region.

Let’s cover both events.

FIRST THE GOOD: SMOKE SHOULD SLOWLY BUT STEADILY IMPROVE THE REST OF THURSDAY IN THE WEST

By Thursday afternoon the air quality readings were…slightly better than the morning. There were lots of yellow (moderate) and orange (unhealthy for sensitive groups) dots around Seattle and the I-5 corridor, with better air quality along the Puget Sound waterfront and worse inland around and past I-405 — though it’s more orange dots than red (unhealthy) dots now, so… yay?

MORE: Current Air Quality Map for Western Washington

But the smoke models are consistent that the ocean winds will come in this evening and tonight and finally push the smoke off to the east. The satellite image already shows a little blob of fog coming down the Strait of Juan de Fuca Thursday evening, and the smoke plumes in Central Washington are already leaning toward the east.

MORE: Here is how to find and read wildfire smoke forecast models for Seattle and the U.S.

More importantly, the smoke model maps look mostly clean any haze by Friday morning in Western Washington, and totally blank by Friday evening.

The official forecast has Seattle “in the green” by Friday evening and Bellevue/Issaquah in the green by Friday night.

MORE: Interagency Wildland Fire Air Quality Response Program

NOW THE BAD: THOSE WINDS WILL ONCE AGAIN RAISE THE FIRE DANGER IN EASTERN WASHINGTON

Similar to last Saturday, these west winds will push across Central and Eastern Washington, starting late Friday, and lasting into this Saturday. They will do a good job of scouring out all the smoke currently piled up against the eastern slopes of the Cascades where air quality readings have ranged from 300 to seemingly eleventybillion.

Normally, these winds would also bring welcome relief from the heat. But not now as these gusts will combine with very low humidity and, of course, an ultra-parched land to reintroduce elevated fire dangers.

A Red Flag Warning — essentially a “Fire Weather Warning” — is now in effect for a large swath of Eastern Washington, including all of the Spokane area, the Columbia Basin/Moses Lake, Palouse/Pullman, and including northern Central Washington like Wenatchee, Chelan, and Winthrop. (Yakima and the Tri-Cities are not in the warning.)

Here, we’re expecting the dangerous combination of wind gusts of 20-30 mph with relative humidity levels of 8-30%.

We do have some minor good news though: Those wind speeds are a bit slower than last Saturday’s 40-45 mph gusts. As a result, this Red Flag Warning is not tagged with the “Particularly Dangerous Situation” event that last week’s historic event had.

MORE: What does the “Particularly Dangerous Situation” Fire Weather Warning mean for Eastern Washington?

Also of note, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has that Eastern Washington warning area in a Level 1 out of 3 “Elevated” fire risk for Friday. Last week’s event already had the highest Level 3 “Extreme” alert, two days in advance.

But even though this fire weather event doesn’t look quite as harrowing as last week’s — which was historic — it is still dangerous. Fires are still very easy to start with the dry vegetation, and gusty winds with low humidity can still promote explosive growth, plus increasing spread of current fires.

Suffice to say, everyone in Eastern Washington needs to be hyper vigilant again. The tragedy of Spokane illustrates how fast a day can go from calm to catastrophic in these situations.

WHEN DOES IT ALL GET BETTER?

For Western Washington, it actually looks like a pleasant stretch of weather coming up with smoke-free sunshine and highs in the upper 70s to low 80s at least into the middle of next week, with westerly breezes keeping the smoke away. If wildfires weren’t such a daunting part of the current landscape, we’d be crowing about how an amazing stretch of weather is in the offing.

For Central and Eastern Washington, it’s better, but still not great. The winds will die down during the day Saturday and remain generally light the rest of the week. The forecast over there isn’t as hot as this past week — more so “normal” August heat. And no current signs of the imminent return of the east winds that pushed all the smoke up against the eastern Cascade foothills. Which is good because it looks like there’s a new fire up there.

Most of next week will feature lighter winds and more localized smoke closer to where fires are burning, with some smoke drifting downwind to the east. There is no solid signal in the long range models yet of either a return to the offshore wind-fueled heat, nor the cold low pressure troughs that bring the blast of west winds.

The good news in that regard is we might effectively get to “bleed the clock” and knock off some days of summer without making things worse on our inevitable march toward the wildfire-squelching rains of autumn.