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Kazumba fire, 5 August 2023 Kazumba

Out · last detection 18 Aug 2023, 12:50 UTC

The fire started on 5 August 2023 in Kazumba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 10,418 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 21th largest in Central Kasai since 2016 (of 85 with a page). Number 14 in Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2023, of 76.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kazumba · 2020Kazumba · 2020Kazumba · 2024Kazumba · 2020

Burnt area
10,418ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
14days
5 Aug 2023 – 18 Aug 2023
Municipalities hit
1
territories
Started on
5 Aug
2023
Heat detections
384
in a single hotspot: 0 MW
Danger at start
43
Very high · FWI index
Average daily power
255MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 5 Aug18 Aug
18 Aug 2023

How it evolved, day by day

5 Aug 2023 · 277 MW · 34 6 Aug 2023 · 74 MW · 9 7 Aug 2023 · 131 MW · 16 9 Aug 2023 · 86 MW · 10 10 Aug 2023 · 2 MW · 1 11 Aug 2023 · 3 MW · 1 12 Aug 2023 · 323 MW · 45 13 Aug 2023 · 57 MW · 7 14 Aug 2023 · 548 MW · 57 15 Aug 2023 · 235 MW · 32 16 Aug 2023 · 839 MW · 69 17 Aug 2023 · 642 MW · 92 18 Aug 2023 · 99 MW · 11
5 Aug 7 Aug 10 Aug 12 Aug 14 Aug 16 Aug 18 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

36°high
41km/h · peak gust
10%lowest humidity

It had gone 35 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

80% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 906 ha in 2016, 2,372 ha in 2017, 1,508 ha in 2018, 1,495 ha in 2019, 8,235 ha in 2020, 346 ha in 2021, 538 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 8,373 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 6.6% of the area of London (104 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. Kazumba where it started
    10,478 ha
    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 2025
Built-up area1.2 ha
Residents≈ 500

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.2 hectares of built-up land and about 500 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)
5 Aug 34.7 °C 16 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 43
6 Aug 36.1 °C 18 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
7 Aug 34.9 °C 19 % 32 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 44
8 Aug 31.8 °C 37 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
9 Aug 34.4 °C 26 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
10 Aug 35.7 °C 22 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm High 37
11 Aug 33.7 °C 28 % 23 km/h 0.1 mm High 37
12 Aug 36.5 °C 10 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
13 Aug 36.4 °C 11 % 35 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
14 Aug 36.3 °C 13 % 22 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
15 Aug 31.6 °C 40 % 29 km/h 0.1 mm High 34
16 Aug 33.6 °C 37 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
17 Aug 34.9 °C 29 % 31 km/h 0.2 mm High 32
18 Aug 34.1 °C 29 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
19 Aug after 30.1 °C 51 % 32 km/h 0.5 mm High 27
20 Aug after 35.0 °C 32 % 27 km/h 0.3 mm High 32
21 Aug after 34.6 °C 35 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 32
22 Aug after 33.8 °C 40 % 27 km/h 0.1 mm High 32
23 Aug after 34.4 °C 31 % 23 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
24 Aug after 33.0 °C 38 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm High 33
25 Aug after 32.9 °C 45 % 35 km/h 0.6 mm High 27
26 Aug after 33.9 °C 38 % 24 km/h 0.0 mm High 27
27 Aug after 33.9 °C 32 % 25 km/h 0.0 mm High 30
28 Aug after 33.2 °C 39 % 25 km/h 0.5 mm High 31

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 29 Jul 2023
After · 25 Aug 2023

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 15 August 2023 the air beside the fire reached 338 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 130: 8.7 times the WHO daily guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak338 µg/m³
Days over the guideline19 days
PM10484 µg/m³
Optical depth4.23
3456789101112131415161718192021
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 · 0Every 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 Kazumba fire last?
GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 5 August 2023 and 18 August 2023: 14 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 10,418 hectares (104.2 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Kazumba (10,478 ha, 0.8 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 36.5 °C, humidity dropped to 10 % and gusts hit 41 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
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 · 4 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.
  1. Last day with fire: 24 August 2023 → 18 August 2023.
  2. Start date: 29 July 2023 → 5 August 2023.
  3. Last day with fire: 18 August 2023 → 24 August 2023.
  4. Start date: 5 August 2023 → 29 July 2023.

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. No 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.