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DZ · Algeria · –

Didouche Mourad fire, August 2019 ديدوش مراد · Constantine, Didouche Mourad

Out · last detection 2 Aug 2019, 12:55 UTC

The fire started on 1 August 2019 in Didouche Mourad, Algeria, and satellites saw it burning for 2 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 2,037 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 7th largest in Constantine since 2016 (of 31 with a page). Number 5 in Algeria in 2019, of 78.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ibn Badis · 2026Ibn Badis · 2022Ain Bouziane · 2026Grarem Gouga · 2026

Burnt area
2,037ha
Copernicus perimeter
Duration
2days
1 Aug 2019 – 2 Aug 2019
Municipalities hit
2
communes
Started on
1 Aug
2019
Heat detections
55
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Average daily power
298MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 1 Aug2 Aug
2 Aug 2019

How it evolved, day by day

1 Aug 2019 · 42 MW · 4 2 Aug 2019 · 556 MW · 51
1 Aug 2 Aug

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

This area had burned before

2% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 49 ha in 2017.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1.3% of the area of London (20 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. Constantine الخروب 179,033 inhabitants · 14.4 km from the centre
    1,027 ha
    5.6 %
  2. Didouche Mourad ديدوش مراد 33,266 inhabitants · 4.0 km from the centre where it started
    1,014 ha
    9.0 %

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 forest55 %
  • Other natural land39 %
  • Agricultural areas5.3 %

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

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area5.8 ha
Residents≈ 500

Inside the perimeter there were about 5.8 hectares of built-up land and about 500 residents (GHSL 2020, 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.

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

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 25 Jul 2019
After · 9 Aug 2019

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

Detections table · 0Every 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 Didouche Mourad fire last?
Copernicus dates it between 1 August 2019 and 2 August 2019: 2 days between the first and last image with fire.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 2,037 hectares (20.4 km²). Official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire entered 2 municipalities: Constantine (1,027 ha, 5.6 %); Didouche Mourad (1,014 ha, 9.0 %).
Did the fire reach a town?
The fire started in Didouche Mourad and came within 4.0 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.
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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Name: Constantine → Didouche Mourad.
  2. Start date: 28 July 2019 → 1 August 2019.
  3. Name: Didouche Mourad → Constantine.
  4. Start date: 1 August 2019 → 28 July 2019.

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. No Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • Built-up area and population come from the JRC Global Human Settlement Layer (epoch 2020, 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 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.