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Gladstone fire, October 2018 Gladstone

Out · last detection 28 Oct 2018, 04:23 UTC

The fire started on 20 October 2018 in Gladstone, Australia, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 5,356 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 1586th largest in Queensland since 2016 (of 1737 with a page). Number 850 in Australia in 2018, of 923.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Gladstone · 2023Gladstone · 2019Rockhampton · 2025

Burnt area
5,356ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
9days
20 Oct 2018 – 28 Oct 2018
Municipalities hit
1
local government areas
Started on
20 Oct
2018
Heat detections
272
in a single hotspot: 60 MW
Danger at start
14
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
186MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Oct28 Oct
28 Oct 2018

How it evolved, day by day

20 Oct 2018 · 22 MW · 6 21 Oct 2018 · 208 MW · 21 22 Oct 2018 · 289 MW · 33 23 Oct 2018 · 86 MW · 16 24 Oct 2018 · 112 MW · 23 25 Oct 2018 · 142 MW · 54 26 Oct 2018 · 269 MW · 46 27 Oct 2018 · 178 MW · 36 28 Oct 2018 · 366 MW · 37
20 Oct 22 Oct 24 Oct 26 Oct 28 Oct

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

The weather it burned in

35°high
41km/h · peak gust
28%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 4.9 mm on 29 Oct.

This area had burned before

7% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 349 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.4% of the area of London (54 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. Gladstone where it started
    5,377 ha reached on 20 Oct
    0.5 %

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 2020
Built-up area< 0.1 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable 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)
20 Oct 29.5 °C 39 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
21 Oct 29.9 °C 40 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
22 Oct 29.8 °C 44 % 28 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 14
23 Oct 29.0 °C 46 % 29 km/h 0.4 mm Moderate 14
24 Oct 32.4 °C 28 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
25 Oct 31.3 °C 34 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
26 Oct 34.8 °C 28 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 21
27 Oct 32.4 °C 35 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
28 Oct 32.9 °C 38 % 41 km/h 0.9 mm Moderate 18
29 Oct after 27.5 °C 60 % 38 km/h 4.9 mm Very low 3

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 13 Oct 2018
After · 4 Nov 2018

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 · 272Every 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 Australia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Gladstone fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 20 October 2018 and 28 October 2018: 9 days between the first and last heat detection of the perimeter.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 5,356 hectares (53.6 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Gladstone (5,377 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.8 °C, humidity dropped to 28 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 25, class High.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Australia (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: 000 · 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 000.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
  • Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 272 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 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 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)). 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.