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Katako-Kombe fire, May 2018 Katako-Kombe

Out · last detection 21 Jun 2018, 11:34 UTC

The fire started on 24 May 2018 in Katako-Kombe, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and satellites saw it burning for 29 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 19,868 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 40th largest in Sankuru since 2016 (of 187 with a page). Number 7 in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018, of 128.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Katako-Kombe · 2016Katako-Kombe · 2023Katako-Kombe · 2024Katako-Kombe · 2026

Burnt area
19,868ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
29days
24 May 2018 – 21 Jun 2018
Municipalities hit
1
territories
Started on
24 May
2018
Heat detections
1,506
in a single hotspot: 186 MW
Danger at start
1
Very low · FWI index
Average daily power
704MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 24 May21 Jun
21 Jun 2018

How it evolved, day by day

24 May 2018 · 41 MW · 2 25 May 2018 · 32 MW · 7 26 May 2018 · 14 MW · 2 28 May 2018 · 153 MW · 29 29 May 2018 · 404 MW · 40 30 May 2018 · 499 MW · 61 31 May 2018 · 307 MW · 28 1 Jun 2018 · 179 MW · 28 2 Jun 2018 · 65 MW · 9 3 Jun 2018 · 298 MW · 27 4 Jun 2018 · 573 MW · 59 5 Jun 2018 · 1,242 MW · 96 6 Jun 2018 · 1,340 MW · 106 7 Jun 2018 · 290 MW · 36 8 Jun 2018 · 565 MW · 57 9 Jun 2018 · 1,145 MW · 74 10 Jun 2018 · 367 MW · 30 11 Jun 2018 · 2,302 MW · 129 12 Jun 2018 · 1,835 MW · 100 13 Jun 2018 · 945 MW · 80 14 Jun 2018 · 1,104 MW · 70 15 Jun 2018 · 2,549 MW · 149 16 Jun 2018 · 1,131 MW · 80 17 Jun 2018 · 776 MW · 73 18 Jun 2018 · 423 MW · 47 19 Jun 2018 · 1,083 MW · 77 20 Jun 2018 · 51 MW · 8 21 Jun 2018 · 9 MW · 2
24 May 29 May 2 Jun 6 Jun 10 Jun 14 Jun 15 Jun 18 Jun

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

The weather it burned in

34°high
43km/h · peak gust
22%lowest humidity

It had gone 0 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 1.6 mm on 26 Jun.

This area had burned before

69% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 10,419 ha in 2016, 10,533 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 13,666 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 13% of the area of London (199 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. Katako-Kombe where it started
    20,001 ha reached on 24 May
    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 2020
Built-up area16 ha
Residents≈ 400

Inside the perimeter there were about 16 hectares of built-up land and about 400 residents (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)
24 May 30.6 °C 60 % 38 km/h 0.4 mm Very low 1
25 May 30.5 °C 59 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 2
26 May 29.3 °C 70 % 32 km/h 0.6 mm Very low 2
27 May 30.5 °C 64 % 34 km/h 1.1 mm Very low 1
28 May 31.2 °C 56 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 3
29 May 29.8 °C 59 % 30 km/h 0.1 mm Very low 4
30 May 30.0 °C 56 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very low 5
31 May 30.3 °C 54 % 32 km/h 0.2 mm Low 6
1 Jun 31.4 °C 45 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Low 7
2 Jun 31.3 °C 47 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm Low 8
3 Jun 31.5 °C 40 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Low 10
4 Jun 29.9 °C 48 % 21 km/h 0.1 mm Low 11
5 Jun 31.0 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 14
6 Jun 30.5 °C 31 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
7 Jun 30.8 °C 32 % 31 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
8 Jun 31.4 °C 32 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
9 Jun 32.1 °C 28 % 30 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
10 Jun 32.3 °C 28 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
11 Jun 33.4 °C 29 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 18
12 Jun 33.6 °C 30 % 33 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 20
13 Jun 33.7 °C 24 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm High 24
14 Jun 33.4 °C 28 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
15 Jun 33.9 °C 32 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
16 Jun 33.9 °C 32 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 23
17 Jun 34.4 °C 22 % 26 km/h 0.0 mm High 25
18 Jun 32.7 °C 24 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
19 Jun 29.8 °C 55 % 26 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 17
20 Jun 29.9 °C 49 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 17
21 Jun 28.2 °C 60 % 24 km/h 4.6 mm Very low 2
22 Jun after 24.3 °C 77 % 19 km/h 0.8 mm Very low 3
23 Jun after 30.9 °C 46 % 27 km/h 0.2 mm Low 9
24 Jun after 30.4 °C 49 % 27 km/h 0.8 mm Low 9
25 Jun after 31.6 °C 45 % 32 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 14
26 Jun after 30.7 °C 54 % 29 km/h 1.6 mm Low 6

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 17 May 2018
After · 28 Jun 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 · 1,506Every 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 Democratic Republic of the Congo ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Katako-Kombe fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 24 May 2018 to 21 June 2018 (29 days). The perimeter dates it from 28 May 2018 to 20 June 2018.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 19,868 hectares (198.7 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Katako-Kombe (20,001 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 34.4 °C, humidity dropped to 22 % and gusts hit 43 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 27, 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

History of this page · 2 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 20 June 2018 → 21 June 2018.
  2. Start date: 28 May 2018 → 24 May 2018.

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; 3 polygons grouped in this page.
  • Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 28 May 2018 to 20 June 2018. 1,506 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 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.