As climate change dictates the need for wildland fire awareness in the western United States, it will be increasingly important to gather and disseminate critical, life-saving information as quickly and competently as possible. By learning to utilize a few free resources, you not only gain a greater situational awareness, but the ability to act based on that information. Early, decisive action can mean the difference between life and death in a rapidly-advancing wildfire situation such as the 2018 Camp Fire, the 2017 Tubbs Fire, or the 2016 Gatlinburg Fire.
InciWeb Incident Information System
preliminary information | fire incident maps
There are a variety of websites that track active and recent wildfires, of varying utility and quality. Often, when a fire grows large enough or threatens enough houses, maps will be made by individuals seeking to help spread information. These can be found doing some Google searching, with various keywords like “FIRENAME Fire Live Map”. When searching for fire incident pages, always seek out government websites. These will give you the most official and unfiltered information on the fire and are often updated far more rapidly than other sites can manage to keep up.
The United States is divided up into several fire districts within the National Interagency Coordination Center:
- Southern Area Coordination Center
Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands - Eastern Area Coordination Center
Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine - Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center
Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, parts of North Dakota - Great Basin Coordination Center
Southern Idaho, parts of western Wyoming, Utah, Nevada - Southwest Coordination Center
Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Texas, Oklahoma panhandle - Alaska Interagency Coordination Center
Alaska (statewide) - Southern California Geographic Coordination Center
California (Roughly south of San Francisco) - Northern California Geographic Coordination Center
California (Roughly north of San Francisco) - Northern Rockies Coordination Center
Montana, North Dakota, northern Idaho - Northwest Coordination Center
Oregon, Washington
In addition to the above links, there are several other websites that track wildfires as incidents. Among the best are CalFire’s incident map, the Active Fire Mapping Program from the United States Forest Service (USFS), and InciWeb’s Incident Information System.
Next, try pinpointing the fire with one of the satellite methods we mentioned in our previous article. Once you know the approximate location of the fire, there are several other methods of gathering information that may be helpful.
FlightRadar24 display over the 2018 Holy Fire
no-fly zone | ads-b and uhf/vhf
Aircraft are ubiquitous over most larger, more aggressive, or more threatening fires. CalFire is a global leader in managing aviation assets, and have categorized them by payload, discussed in this PDF. There are myriad ADS-B flight tracking websites today (FlightAware, RadarBox24), but by far the two most useful for tracking fires in the US are FlightRadar24 and ADSBExchange. Look for aircraft behaving strangely around the area where you know the fire to be burning. Often firefighting aircraft will circle a fire for hours, while others make long passes before returning to nearby airports. Running the tail number/N-Number of an aircraft (Starts with the letter N, followed by letters and numbers) through the FAA’s database will tell you who owns the aircraft, and thus confirm/deny if it is a firefighting aircraft.
Often aircraft can be heard communicating with a nearby air traffic control center or tower, coordinating their arrival/departure from the airport itself as well as their operations (to make sure no unfortunate midair collisions take place). Many airports have air traffic control streams that can be heard live at LiveATC.com.
Finally, both ground and air units can be heard on conventional police/fire scanners. The most reliable website is Broadcastify, which has (free) livestreams and (for a minor fee) archived broadcasts.
localized information | state, county, and city incident trackers
While not universal, many municipalities and county governments have live (or nearly live) incident tracking websites that allow citizens to keep tabs on events in their area. Many will have a delay on police information, but fire information is almost always kept current. Some examples are:
- San Francisco Fire Incident Tracker
- Seattle Fire Incident Map
- California Highway Patrol Incident Log
- PulsePoint (nationwide, check for your local area)
The 2018 Holy Fire seen from an HPWREN camera (full video)
visual confirmation | live camera feeds
AlertWildfire is a website developed by a collection of various agencies and associations in the western United States that allows everyday citizens to monitor, in real time, for wildfires. Find your region, then search for a nearby camera by using the map view on the right side of the screen. Alternately, find the camera you want by scrolling down until you see a bunch of various camera screens. Click one you want, and it will become the main image on the screen. Right-click to play back footage from the day in time-lapse form, showing a video-like sequence of fire behavior. HPWREN is another site, albeit with less cameras (and many of them are the same cameras available on the previous site) that allows for more archival searching, and is a little bit easier to use in terms of getting the camera angle you want.
Alternately, you can search for incidents with nearby traffic cameras. Many agencies are switching to video streams instead of still images, making fire tracking far easier. Some examples include:
- City of Seattle (+ on a camera denotes video-capable)
- CalTrans (+ on a camera denotes video-capable)
- State of Nevada
- TxDOT
Ultimately, it comes down to keyword searching. Try combinations of various words related to the source you’d like to find, along with your local area name, and see what you come up with. And remember to check regularly; new sites are appearing all the time.
