The fastest way to answer:
“Is that fire near me?”
Fire Nearby aggregates the official wildfire feeds for the United States and Canada into one live map and a page for every state, province, and fire. It exists because checking on a wildfire should take seconds, not a tour of half a dozen agency websites.
Why we are different
Official sources only
Every fire on this site comes from the agencies that actually manage incidents: NIFC/IRWIN and CAL FIRE in the US, and the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System from Natural Resources Canada. No scraping news articles, no crowdsourced guesses.
Always timestamped
Every layer, table, and stat shows when it was last updated. If a feed is delayed upstream, we say so on this page instead of pretending the data is current.
The full picture on one map
Active fires, official perimeters, satellite heat detections, smoke plumes, air quality, wind direction, and fire, wind, and heat alerts, all togglable on a single fast map. Most sites make you visit three or four government pages to piece this together.
Early signals before a fire has a name
Satellite heat detections usually appear one to three hours after a satellite pass; official incident reports for a brand-new fire can lag hours behind that. When satellites pick up heat near your searched location that matches no reported fire, your risk report flags it as an early signal, often before any other public source.
Built to be fast
We poll the agencies on a schedule, cache everything on our servers, and serve you prebuilt pages. You never wait on a slow government API, and your visit never adds load to emergency infrastructure.
US and Canada together
Wildfire smoke does not respect borders. We cover all 50 states plus Canadian provinces and territories in one place, with per-region pages and historical context for each.
History, not just headlines
Each location page includes decades of fire history: yearly trends, the largest fires on record, and human impact data from ICS-209-PLUS incident reports and the Canadian National Fire Database.
Where the data comes from
Active fires (US): the National Interagency Fire Center’s WFIGS system, fed by IRWIN, the same integrated reporting pipeline dispatch centers use. California incidents are cross-checked against CAL FIRE.
Active fires (Canada): the Canadian Wildland Fire Information System (CWFIS), run by Natural Resources Canada.
Perimeters: official WFIGS incident perimeters, simplified server-side so maps load fast without losing shape.
Satellite hotspots: VIIRS/MODIS heat detections relayed through CWFIS, covering all of North America in the last 24 hours.
Smoke: NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System smoke analysis, drawn by satellite analysts.
Weather alerts: National Weather Service fire, wind, and heat products (Red Flag Warnings, High Wind Warnings, Heat Advisories, and more), each linking to the official NWS record.
Air quality: the US EPA AQI scale, computed from Open-Meteo’s air quality model on a land-only grid across the US and Canada.
Wind: current wind speed and direction at every significant fire from Open-Meteo’s forecast model, shown as arrows on the map and factored into near-me risk reports.
History: NIFC incident archives, ICS-209-PLUS research dataset (US impact reports 1999–2020), and the Canadian National Fire Database. Browse it in the US archive and Canada archive.
Data freshness, live
Transparency is the product. This is the current health of every upstream source we aggregate; the same staleness checks drive warnings across the site.
The fine print
Fire Nearby aggregates official sources but is not itself an official source and is not an emergency notification service. During an active emergency, always follow evacuation instructions from local authorities, and sign up for your county or province’s official alerting system.