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Bendjarah fire, July 2020 بن جراح · Bendjarah, Belkheir

Out · last detection 28 Jul 2020, 13:26 UTC

The fire started on 25 July 2020 in Bendjarah, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 4 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 595 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 10th largest in Guelma since 2016 (of 40 with a page). Number 40 in Algeria in 2020, of 236.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Heliopolis · 2026Djebala Khemissi · 2026Nechmaya · 2019Eulma · 2026

Burnt area
595ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
4days
25 Jul 2020 – 28 Jul 2020
Municipalities hit
2
communes
Started on
25 Jul
2020
Heat detections
34
in a single hotspot: 118 MW
Danger at start
36
High · FWI index
Average daily power
124MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Jul28 Jul
28 Jul 2020

How it evolved, day by day

26 Jul 2020 · 104 MW · 10 27 Jul 2020 · 170 MW · 8 28 Jul 2020 · 99 MW · 16
26 Jul 27 Jul 28 Jul

Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.

The weather it burned in

37°high
45km/h · peak gust
15%lowest humidity

It had gone 9 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 0.4% of the area of London (6 km² against 1,583 km²).

London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).

This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.

What happened to each town

  1. Bendjarah بن جراح 6,553 inhabitants · 4.3 km from the centre where it started
    577 ha reached on 26 Jul
    7.4 %
  2. Belkheir
    19 ha reached on 28 Jul
    0.2 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance runs from the point marking the centre of each area to the nearest fire: staying a kilometre away does not mean it reached the houses.

What burned

  • Mixed forest50 %
  • Other natural land47 %
  • Broadleaved forest3.2 %

Land cover inside the perimeter as reported by Copernicus EFFIS (outside the Corine Land Cover area).

The weather day by day

ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, the standard reference for past weather, and the Canadian Fire Weather Index (the same system Copernicus uses), computed by WorldFires from that data. Days after the fire run until the first rain.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Climate Change Service (ERA5)

Day High Min. humidity Peak gust Rain Danger (FWI)
25 Jul 32.8 °C 25 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
26 Jul 35.4 °C 18 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
27 Jul 36.6 °C 15 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
28 Jul 35.8 °C 16 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
29 Jul after 35.4 °C 17 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 50
30 Jul after 36.2 °C 14 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
31 Jul after 36.6 °C 13 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
1 Aug after 35.3 °C 15 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 51
2 Aug after 36.1 °C 12 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
3 Aug after 34.7 °C 20 % 47 km/h 0.7 mm Very high 45
4 Aug after 26.5 °C 49 % 38 km/h 0.2 mm High 29
5 Aug after 26.9 °C 29 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
6 Aug after 27.9 °C 29 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
7 Aug after 28.6 °C 26 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm High 35

Before and after, from space

Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.

Before · 18 Jul 2020
After · 4 Aug 2020

If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.

The smoke

CAMS · Copernicus

On 30 July 2020 the air beside the fire reached 20 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak20 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1030 µg/m³
232425262728293031
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.

Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)

Detections table · 34Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
⬇ Download CSV Times in UTC. Each detection is a 375 m pixel: a large fire yields hundreds per pass.
Date and timeSatelliteFRP (MW)LatLon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Algeria ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Bendjarah fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 25 July 2020 and 28 July 2020: 4 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 595 hectares (6.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Bendjarah (577 ha, 7.4 %); Belkheir (19 ha, 0.2 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Bendjarah and came within 4.3 km of its centre. That is the distance from the perimeter, or the nearest hotspot, to the point marking the centre; it does not mean it entered the houses.
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.6 °C, humidity dropped to 15 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 51, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Algeria (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

Where to verify it

A satellite detection is not an official report. Final figures and the fire’s status are published by each country’s emergency service.

Emergency number: 14 · 1021 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

History of this page Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

No changes since 24 October 2026.

RSS Changes to this page

Does something look wrong on this page?

This page is built from satellite data and official records, and it sometimes gets things wrong: the wrong dates, the wrong town, two fires merged into one, or something that was not a wildfire at all. If you know this fire first-hand (you live nearby, saw it, fought it or reported on it), tell us what really happened and we will check it.

Report an error
What do you think is wrong?

We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 14 · 1021.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 34 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Weather: Copernicus ERA5 reanalysis at the fire location, in cells of about 25 km.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. Municipal boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM3 (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.