How long did the Kamonia fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 20 July 2025 to 16 August 2025 (28 days). The perimeter dates it from 26 July 2025 to 9 August 2025.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,589 hectares (65.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Kamonia (6,628 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 32.8 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 33 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

CD · Democratic Republic of the Congo · 2025-07-20 → 2025-08-16

Kamonia fire, 20 July 2025 Kamonia

Out · last detection 16 Aug 2025, 11:42 UTC

The fire started on 20 July 2025 in Kamonia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and satellites saw it burning for 28 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 6,589 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 42th largest in Kasaï since 2016 (of 78 with a page). Number 76 in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2025, of 118.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kamonia · 2020 Kamonia · 2026 Kamonia · 2023 Kamonia · 2023

Burnt area: 6,589ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 28days; 20 Jul 2025 – 16 Aug 2025
Municipalities hit: 1; territories
Started on: 20 Jul; 2025
Heat detections: 387; in a single hotspot: 117 MW
Danger at start: 12; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 181MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 20 Jul16 Aug

Play back 16 Aug 2025

How it evolved, day by day

20 Jul 27 Jul 30 Jul 31 Jul 4 Aug 8 Aug 14 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

33°high

33km/h · peak gust

19%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.1 mm on 26 Aug.

This area had burned before

74% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 2,749 ha in 2016, 2,944 ha in 2020, 1,597 ha in 2022, 931 ha in 2023, 945 ha in 2024. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 4,859 ha that had burned before.

1,103 ha Kamonia fire, July 2020 5,072 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 4.2% of the area of London (66 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

Kamonia where it started

6,628 ha reached on 20 Jul

0.2 %

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 area0.23 ha

Residents≈ 90

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.23 hectares of built-up land and about 90 residents (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)
20 Jul	30.5 °C	44 %	23 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 12
21 Jul	27.7 °C	53 %	19 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 14
22 Jul	30.1 °C	37 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
23 Jul	31.4 °C	32 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
24 Jul	29.9 °C	39 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 26
25 Jul	30.4 °C	35 %	16 km/h	0.0 mm	High 25
26 Jul	32.8 °C	32 %	26 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
27 Jul	30.0 °C	50 %	19 km/h	0.4 mm	High 22
28 Jul	31.1 °C	29 %	31 km/h	0.6 mm	High 26
29 Jul	31.8 °C	26 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
30 Jul	31.9 °C	22 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
31 Jul	32.3 °C	19 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
1 Aug	32.1 °C	21 %	24 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
2 Aug	32.1 °C	23 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
3 Aug	31.3 °C	23 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 34
4 Aug	31.8 °C	20 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 37
5 Aug	31.7 °C	24 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	High 36
6 Aug	31.4 °C	34 %	29 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
7 Aug	31.1 °C	37 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
8 Aug	30.3 °C	46 %	20 km/h	0.3 mm	High 26
9 Aug	29.3 °C	48 %	23 km/h	0.7 mm	Moderate 20
10 Aug	30.2 °C	45 %	20 km/h	0.1 mm	High 22
11 Aug	29.5 °C	47 %	18 km/h	0.1 mm	High 22
12 Aug	29.1 °C	49 %	19 km/h	0.2 mm	High 21
13 Aug	27.7 °C	52 %	21 km/h	0.2 mm	High 21
14 Aug	30.4 °C	40 %	22 km/h	0.1 mm	High 24
15 Aug	31.4 °C	32 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
16 Aug	31.0 °C	33 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
17 Aug after	30.2 °C	42 %	32 km/h	0.0 mm	High 29
18 Aug after	29.7 °C	42 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
19 Aug after	30.8 °C	37 %	20 km/h	0.0 mm	High 27
20 Aug after	32.2 °C	28 %	25 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
21 Aug after	30.5 °C	37 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	High 31
22 Aug after	32.0 °C	29 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	High 30
23 Aug after	33.9 °C	21 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	High 35
24 Aug after	30.3 °C	36 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	High 33
25 Aug after	30.7 °C	46 %	27 km/h	0.0 mm	High 28
26 Aug after	32.3 °C	43 %	24 km/h	1.1 mm	Moderate 19

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 13 Jul 2025

After · 23 Aug 2025

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 1 August 2025 the air beside the fire reached 215 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 118: 7.9 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak215 µg/m³

Days over the guideline20 days

PM10220 µg/m³

Optical depth2.12

WHO 15

2425262728293031123456789101112

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 · 387Every 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 Democratic Republic of the Congo ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kamonia fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 20 July 2025 to 16 August 2025 (28 days). The perimeter dates it from 26 July 2025 to 9 August 2025.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 6,589 hectares (65.9 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Kamonia (6,628 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 32.8 °C, humidity dropped to 19 % and gusts hit 33 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 37, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Democratic Republic of the Congo (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.

Satellite cross-check

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

26 October 2026 Last day with fire: 9 August 2025 → 16 August 2025.
26 October 2026 Start date: 26 July 2025 → 20 July 2025.

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?

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How we know this

Perimeter: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 26 July 2025 to 9 August 2025. 387 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