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Kasama fire, 10 September 2017 Kasama

Out · last detection 17 Sept 2017, 11:26 UTC

The fire started on 10 September 2017 in Kasama, Zambia, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 8,154 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 111th largest in Northern since 2016 (of 628 with a page). Number 53 in Zambia in 2017, of 230.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Luwingu · 2016Kasama · 2016Kasama · 2025Luwingu · 2026

Burnt area
8,154ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
7days
10 Sept 2017 – 16 Sept 2017
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
10 Sept
2017
Heat detections
281
in a single hotspot: 124 MW
Danger at start
46
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
611MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 10 Sept16 Sept
17 Sept 2017

How it evolved, day by day

10 Sept 2017 · 384 MW · 6 11 Sept 2017 · 1,857 MW · 96 12 Sept 2017 · 1,231 MW · 55 13 Sept 2017 · 226 MW · 23 14 Sept 2017 · 70 MW · 13 15 Sept 2017 · 462 MW · 39 16 Sept 2017 · 573 MW · 21 17 Sept 2017 · 85 MW · 9
10 Sept 11 Sept 12 Sept 14 Sept 16 Sept

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
40km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

It had gone more than two months without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

53% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 4,291 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 5.1% of the area of London (82 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. Kasama where it started
    8,212 ha reached on 5 Sept
    0.8 %

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 2015
Built-up area4.6 ha
Residents≈ 250

Inside the perimeter there were about 4.6 hectares of built-up land and about 250 residents (GHSL 2015, 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)
10 Sept 30.8 °C 23 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
11 Sept 31.3 °C 19 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
12 Sept 31.1 °C 17 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
13 Sept 30.8 °C 18 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
14 Sept 30.9 °C 18 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
15 Sept 31.8 °C 16 % 29 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
16 Sept 31.6 °C 18 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
17 Sept after 32.7 °C 18 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 42
18 Sept after 32.4 °C 16 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
19 Sept after 32.1 °C 19 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
20 Sept after 32.0 °C 26 % 39 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
21 Sept after 32.1 °C 19 % 44 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
22 Sept after 31.1 °C 20 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
23 Sept after 31.6 °C 21 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
24 Sept after 31.2 °C 23 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
25 Sept after 32.3 °C 19 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 46
26 Sept after 31.8 °C 21 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 3 Sept 2017
After · 23 Sept 2017

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 · 281Every 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 Zambia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kasama fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 10 September 2017 and 16 September 2017: 7 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 8,154 hectares (81.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kasama (8,212 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 31.8 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 40 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 47, class Very high.
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zambia (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

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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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. 281 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 2015, 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 (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.