How long did the Kham fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 April 2023 to 7 April 2023 (6 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 April 2023 to 6 April 2023.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,410 hectares (24.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Kham (2,422 ha, 1.2 %).

Where does this data come from?

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

LA · Laos · 2023-04-02 → 2023-04-07

Kham fire, 2 April 2023 Kham

Out · last detection 7 Apr 2023, 06:07 UTC

The fire started on 2 April 2023 in Kham, Laos, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 2,410 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 84th largest in Xiangkhouang since 2016 (of 109 with a page). Number 172 in Laos in 2023, of 239.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Kham · 2020 Kham · 2026 Pek · 2023 Phookood · 2025

Burnt area: 2,410ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 6days; 2 Apr 2023 – 7 Apr 2023
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 2 Apr; 2023
Heat detections: 72; in a single hotspot: 167 MW
Average daily power: 333MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Apr7 Apr

Play back 7 Apr 2023

How it evolved, day by day

2 Apr 3 Apr 4 Apr 5 Apr 6 Apr 7 Apr

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

This area had burned before

12% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 300 ha in 2016, 1 ha in 2020.

1 ha Kham fire, March 2020 4,762 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 1.5% of the area of London (24 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

Kham where it started

2,422 ha

1.2 %

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.

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 26 Mar 2023

After · 14 Apr 2023

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.

Detections table · 72Every 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 Laos ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Kham fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 April 2023 to 7 April 2023 (6 days). The perimeter dates it from 2 April 2023 to 6 April 2023.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 2,410 hectares (24.1 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Kham (2,422 ha, 1.2 %).
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Laos (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 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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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 2 April 2023 to 6 April 2023. 72 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
We have not matched this page with any official record.

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