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Douglas fire, July 2019 Douglas

Out · last detection 6 Aug 2019, 10:26 UTC

The fire started on 25 July 2019 in Douglas, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 13 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 5,493 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 109th largest in Oregon since 2016 (of 327 with a page). Number 52 in United States in 2019, of 367.

Compare with…
Burnt area
5,493ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 13days
25 Jul 2019 – 6 Aug 2019
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
25 Jul
2019
Heat detections
680
in a single hotspot: 157 MW
Danger at start
44
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
633MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 25 Jul6 Aug
6 Aug 2019

How it evolved, day by day

25 Jul 2019 · 450 MW · 13 26 Jul 2019 · 2,901 MW · 205 27 Jul 2019 · 1,642 MW · 235 28 Jul 2019 · 646 MW · 120 29 Jul 2019 · 598 MW · 67 30 Jul 2019 · 35 MW · 5 31 Jul 2019 · 22 MW · 10 1 Aug 2019 · 30 MW · 15 2 Aug 2019 · 10 MW · 9 6 Aug 2019 · 0 MW · 1
25 Jul 26 Jul 27 Jul 29 Jul 31 Jul 2 Aug

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

The weather it burned in

32°high
47km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

It had gone 27 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.2 mm on 9 Aug.

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 3.5% of the area of London (55 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 county

  1. Douglas where it started
    5,446 ha reached on 25 Jul
    0.4 %

Burnt area inside each county, 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area0.41 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.41 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (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

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 32.5 °C 16 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
26 Jul 31.7 °C 22 % 47 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
27 Jul 30.3 °C 28 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
28 Jul 29.9 °C 23 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 41
29 Jul 27.5 °C 32 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
30 Jul 27.2 °C 25 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm High 35
31 Jul 31.0 °C 21 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
1 Aug 31.9 °C 24 % 42 km/h 0.3 mm High 38
2 Aug 30.9 °C 26 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 38
3 Aug 31.7 °C 29 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
4 Aug 31.8 °C 28 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 39
5 Aug 31.8 °C 29 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 40
6 Aug 30.0 °C 32 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
7 Aug after 28.1 °C 36 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm High 36
8 Aug after 24.8 °C 44 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 29
9 Aug after 24.8 °C 40 % 30 km/h 4.2 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 18 Jul 2019
After · 13 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 · 680Every 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 United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Douglas fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (25 July 2019). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 6 August 2019 (13 days from 25 July 2019), the last day with detections before more than 10 days in a row without any, so it is approximate.
How much area did it burn?
The official perimeter published by United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) is 5,493 hectares (54.9 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Douglas (5,446 ha, 0.4 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 32.5 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 47 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 44, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the official burnt perimeter of United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC, public domain), NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of United States. 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: 911 · 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.

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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 911.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: MTBS (US Geological Survey and US Forest Service), official.
  • The official perimeter has no end date: the end is the last day with VIIRS detections inside the perimeter before a gap of more than 10 days (150 days at most), so it is approximate. 680 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 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 is official and in the public domain. For past years it comes from MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity), run by the U.S. Geological Survey and the USDA Forest Service, which map it on Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. For the current and last year it comes from WFIGS at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC): incident perimeters mapped by fire crews, aircraft and imagery. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. County boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Public Domain). The area per county is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from official figures.