How long did the Buon Don fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 February 2026 to 26 February 2026 (26 days). The perimeter dates it from 8 February 2026 to 26 February 2026.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,072 hectares (100.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Buon Don (10,051 ha, 7.1 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.

Where does this data come from?

From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Vietnam (geoBoundaries). It is not an official report.

VN · Vietnam · 2026-02-01 → 2026-02-26

Buon Don fire, 1 February 2026 Buon Don

Out · last detection 26 Feb 2026, 06:09 UTC

The fire started on 1 February 2026 in Buon Don, Vietnam, and satellites saw it burning for 26 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,072 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the largest fire in Đắk Lắk since 2016 (of 38 with a page). Number 4 in Vietnam in 2026, of 99.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Buon Don · 2024 Buon Don · 2025 Buon Don · 2025 Cu Jut · 2026

Burnt area: 10,072ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 26days; 1 Feb 2026 – 26 Feb 2026
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 1 Feb; 2026
Heat detections: 173; in a single hotspot: 92 MW
Danger at start: 32; High · FWI index
Average daily power: 78MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Feb26 Feb

Play back 26 Feb 2026

How it evolved, day by day

1 Feb 6 Feb 10 Feb 14 Feb 15 Feb 17 Feb 22 Feb 26 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

36°high

54km/h · peak gust

24%lowest humidity

It had gone 52 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 27.8 mm on 27 Feb.

This area had burned before

37% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 535 ha in 2016, 1,173 ha in 2017, 1,048 ha in 2024, 1,145 ha in 2025.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 6.4% of the area of London (101 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

Buon Don where it started

10,051 ha reached on 1 Feb

7.1 %

Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2025

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, satellite-based estimate).

This is an estimate on 100 m cells, made from satellite imagery and census data: it does not mean that homes burned or that anyone was harmed. The perimeter also contains land that never burned. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

Source: Global Human Settlement Layer (GHS-BUILT-S and GHS-POP R2023A), European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), © European Union, CC BY 4.0. Sum inside the perimeter computed by WorldFires. human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu

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)
1 Feb	32.1 °C	34 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 32
2 Feb	30.7 °C	43 %	52 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
3 Feb	29.6 °C	50 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
4 Feb	34.0 °C	34 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
5 Feb	33.4 °C	37 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
6 Feb	35.1 °C	32 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
7 Feb	33.2 °C	38 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
8 Feb	33.6 °C	31 %	53 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
9 Feb	33.0 °C	34 %	54 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
10 Feb	34.4 °C	35 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
11 Feb	28.4 °C	63 %	41 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
12 Feb	33.9 °C	37 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
13 Feb	34.7 °C	27 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
14 Feb	35.0 °C	29 %	43 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
15 Feb	34.1 °C	40 %	42 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
16 Feb	35.9 °C	37 %	40 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
17 Feb	35.0 °C	36 %	50 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
18 Feb	34.1 °C	38 %	54 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
19 Feb	33.8 °C	35 %	51 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
20 Feb	35.0 °C	30 %	46 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
21 Feb	36.3 °C	24 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 38
22 Feb	35.7 °C	27 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
23 Feb	36.5 °C	30 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
24 Feb	36.0 °C	32 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 40
25 Feb	35.7 °C	27 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	Very high 39
26 Feb	36.5 °C	38 %	31 km/h	3.5 mm	Moderate 14
27 Feb after	26.3 °C	85 %	17 km/h	27.8 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 25 Jan 2026

After · 5 Mar 2026

Before After

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 22 February 2026 the air beside the fire reached 36 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 26: 1.7 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak36 µg/m³

Days over the guideline6 days

PM1037 µg/m³

Optical depth0.60

WHO 15

6789101112131415161718192021222324252627281

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 · 173Every 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 time	Satellite	FRP (MW)	Lat	Lon

Other fires nearby

All fires in Vietnam ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Buon Don fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 1 February 2026 to 26 February 2026 (26 days). The perimeter dates it from 8 February 2026 to 26 February 2026.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 10,072 hectares (100.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Buon Don (10,051 ha, 7.1 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 24 % and gusts hit 54 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 40, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Vietnam (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: 114 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Start date: 8 February 2026 → 1 February 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?

Dates or duration Place or towns Burned area Name It was not a wildfire Same fire as another page Something else

What really happened?

Your connection to the fire (optional) Email (optional)

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 114.

How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery; 8 polygons grouped in this page.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 8 February 2026 to 26 February 2026. 173 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.
Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2025, 100 m cells), summed inside the perimeter: an estimate of what was there, not a damage count.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter comes from the Copernicus Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), which rebuilds it from MODIS and VIIRS heat detections and publishes it under CC BY 4.0. It is not measured on imagery as in Europe, so it is an estimate. 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 ADM2 (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Intergovernmental Organisations (CC BY 3.0 IGO)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ from each country’s official figure.

Where it burned