Jurilovca fire, August 2026 Jurilovca
The fire started on 5 August 2026 in Jurilovca, Romania, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 718 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across a single municipality.
This record is fire in the reed beds of the Danube Delta, not a forest fire. Thousands of hectares of reed burn in the delta every year, mostly between January and April, and many of these burns are deliberate. That is why it is left out of the fire rankings.
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- Burnt area
- 718ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- ≈ 3days
- 5 Aug 2026 – 7 Aug 2026
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- municipalities
- Started on
- 5 Aug
- 2026
- Heat detections
- 15
- in a single hotspot: 39 MW
- Danger at start
- 18
- Moderate · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 140MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 12 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.
This area had burned before
68% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 150 ha in 2020, 194 ha in 2022, 123 ha in 2023, 397 ha in 2025. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 487 ha that had burned before.
- 181 ha Jurilovca fire, August 2025 277 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 150 ha Jurilovca fire, September 2020 168 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 108 ha Jurilovca fire, July 2022 316 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 103 ha Jurilovca fire, September 2023 109 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 86 ha Jurilovca fire, July 2022 108 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 45 ha Jurilovca fire, July 2025 106 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Bucharest boundary: geoBoundaries · World Bank (CC BY 4.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
719 ha reached on 5 Aug2.4 %
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
- Other natural land76 %
- Agricultural areas24 %
Natura 2000 protected area affected: 27 %
- ZEPA Delta Dunării și Complexul Razim - Sinoie ROSPA0031
Natura 2000 sites (European Environment Agency, 2024 release) crossed by the perimeter.
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 Aug | 31.9 °C | 41 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 18 |
| 6 Aug | 32.4 °C | 41 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 7 Aug | 33.9 °C | 29 % | 29 km/h | 0.0 mm | Moderate 21 |
| 8 Aug after | 32.9 °C | 42 % | 48 km/h | 0.3 mm | High 30 |
| 9 Aug after | 29.7 °C | 37 % | 50 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 31 |
| 10 Aug after | 29.5 °C | 29 % | 33 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 11 Aug after | 33.1 °C | 20 % | 23 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 12 Aug after | 31.5 °C | 38 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 32 |
| 13 Aug after | 26.8 °C | 35 % | 41 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 29 |
| 14 Aug after | 26.7 °C | 31 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 27 |
| 15 Aug after | 26.5 °C | 37 % | 34 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 26 |
| 16 Aug after | 28.2 °C | 30 % | 28 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 24 |
| 17 Aug after | 28.2 °C | 33 % | 35 km/h | 0.0 mm | High 28 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · CopernicusOn 6 August 2026 the air beside the fire reached 35 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 17: 1.2 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
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 · 15Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,765 haMurighiol6 March 2019 · 2 days · 17 km away
- 2,067 haMurighiol22 March 2022 · 6 days · 30 km away
- 5,420 haSfântu Gheorghe8 March 2021 · 2 days · 34 km away
- 5,103 haSfântu Gheorghe20 February 2019 · 1 day · 34 km away
- 1,617 haMurighiol9 October 2020 · 1 day · 36 km away
- 2,521 haSfântu Gheorghe5 April 2020 · 3 days · 37 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Jurilovca fire last?
- The official perimeter only gives the start date (5 August 2026). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 7 August 2026 (3 days from 5 August 2026), 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 perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 718 hectares (7.2 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Jurilovca (719 ha, 2.4 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Jurilovca and came within 9.9 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 33.9 °C, humidity dropped to 29 % and gusts hit 35 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 21, class Moderate.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Romania (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: 112 · 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.
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- 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. 15 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.
- Probably a vegetation burn: not counted in the totals.
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 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 slightly from each country’s official figure.