Lăpușnicel fire, 20 March 2022 Lăpușnicel, Prigor, Mehadica
The fire started on 20 March 2022 in Lăpușnicel, Romania, and satellites saw it burning for 9 days. Copernicus mapped a burnt perimeter of 2,705 hectares from satellite imagery, spread across 3 municipalities.
It is the largest fire in Caraș-Severin since 2016 (of 194 with a page). The largest in Romania in 2022, of 186.
The power measured by the satellite is low (15.8 MW in the strongest hotspot), more typical of grass or stubble burning, or a slow surface fire, than of a large crown fire.
Compare with…
- Burnt area
- 2,705ha
- Copernicus perimeter
- Duration
- 9days
- 20 Mar 2022 – 28 Mar 2022
- Municipalities hit
- 3
- municipalities
- Started on
- 20 Mar
- 2022
- Heat detections
- 106
- in a single hotspot: 16 MW
- Danger at start
- 1
- Very low · FWI index
- Average daily power
- 71MW
- detected power per day, on average
Where it burned
How it evolved, day by day
Fire radiative power detected each day, in megawatts, and number of hotspots. The magenta bar marks the peak day.
The weather it burned in
It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 14.8 mm on 31 Mar.
This area had burned before
28% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 235 ha in 2019, 388 ha in 2020, 183 ha in 2021. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 758 ha that had burned before.
- 388 ha Lăpușnicel fire, March 2020 455 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 183 ha Prigor fire, February 2021 228 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 118 ha Lăpușnicel fire, April 2019 273 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 117 ha Prigor fire, March 2019 229 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
How big is it?
London boundary: geoBoundaries · Office for National Statistics (Open Government Licence v3.0).
Bucharest boundary: geoBoundaries · World Bank (CC BY 4.0).
Paris boundary: geoBoundaries · Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière (IGN-F) (Etalab Open License 2.0).
Madrid boundary: geoBoundaries · Open Data ESRI, IGN Central Registry of Cartography Area (CC BY 4.0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
1,954 ha reached on 20 Mar26 %
-
Prigor 2,078 inhabitants · 3.8 km from the centre749 ha reached on 23 Mar2.5 %
-
1 ha reached on 25 Mar0.0 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the official 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.
What burned
- Agricultural areas64 %
- Broadleaved forest30 %
- Scrub and transitional woodland5.6 %
Land cover inside the perimeter according to Corine Land Cover, as reported by Copernicus.
People and buildings inside the perimeter
GHSL 2020Inside the perimeter there were about 0.99 hectares of built-up land and about 50 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) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 Mar | 13.7 °C | 33 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 1 |
| 23 Mar | 14.1 °C | 28 % | 24 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 3 |
| 24 Mar | 15.4 °C | 21 % | 44 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 5 |
| 25 Mar | 12.0 °C | 33 % | 57 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 6 |
| 26 Mar | 14.2 °C | 34 % | 31 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 5 |
| 27 Mar | 14.3 °C | 42 % | 45 km/h | 0.0 mm | Low 5 |
| 28 Mar | 13.5 °C | 39 % | 20 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 4 |
| 29 Mar after | 15.8 °C | 40 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 5 |
| 30 Mar after | 13.8 °C | 44 % | 27 km/h | 0.0 mm | Very low 5 |
| 31 Mar after | 11.6 °C | 68 % | 53 km/h | 14.8 mm | Very low 0 |
Before and after, from space
Drag the line to compare the same ground before the fire and after it.
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 · 106Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Other fires nearby
- 1,896 haLăpușnicel6 March 2025 · 5 days · 0 km away
- 1,081 haLăpușnicel17 February 2024 · 3 days · 2 km away
- 1,897 haLăpușnicel23 March 2022 · 7 days · 4 km away
- 1,158 haIablanița6 March 2025 · 4 days · 5 km away
- 778 haPodeniSeptember 2026 · 13 days · 25 km away
- 828 haTopleț14 September 2026 · 27 days · 27 km away
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Lăpușnicel fire last?
- According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 20 March 2022 to 28 March 2022 (9 days). The perimeter dates it from 22 March 2022 to 27 March 2022.
- How much area did it burn?
- The perimeter Copernicus measured from satellite imagery is 2,705 hectares (27.0 km²). Official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire entered 3 municipalities: Lăpușnicel (1,954 ha, 26 %); Prigor (749 ha, 2.5 %); Mehadica (1 ha, 0.0 %).
- Did the fire reach a town?
- The fire started in Lăpușnicel and reached its centre: the point marking it was inside the burnt area or less than 500 metres from it. That does not mean houses burned.
- What was the weather like?
- During the fire the temperature reached 15.4 °C, humidity dropped to 21 % and gusts hit 57 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 6, class Low.
- Where does this data come from?
- From the EFFIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Romania (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.
Emergency number: 112 · Emergency number and official warnings ›
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.
- Last day with fire: 27 March 2022 → 28 March 2022.
- Start date: 22 March 2022 → 20 March 2022.
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
How we know this
- Perimeter: EFFIS (Copernicus), mapped on satellite imagery.
- Dates adjusted with the VIIRS detections inside the perimeter, which said 22 March 2022 to 27 March 2022. 106 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.
Where this data comes from
The perimeter and land cover come from the Copernicus European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS), measured on MODIS and Sentinel-2 imagery and published under CC BY 4.0. 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 International (CC BY 4.0)). The area per municipality is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from each country’s official figure.