How long did the Lower Banta fire last?

GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 March 2016 and 29 March 2016: 3 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 1,182 hectares (11.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire entered 2 municipalities: Bagruwa (611 ha, 0.7 %); Lower Banta (579 ha, 1.2 %).

Where does this data come from?

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

SL · Sierra Leone · 2016-03-27 → 2016-03-29

Lower Banta fire, March 2016 Bagruwa, Lower Banta

Out · last detection 30 Mar 2016, 14:04 UTC

The fire started on 27 March 2016 in Lower Banta, Sierra Leone, and satellites saw it burning for 3 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,182 hectares from heat detections, spread across 2 municipalities.

It is the 255th largest in Southern since 2016 (of 393 with a page). Number 152 in Sierra Leone in 2016, of 208.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Bagruwa · 2017 Bagruwa · 2026 Bagruwa · 2025 Bagruwa · 2017

Burnt area: 1,182ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 3days; 27 Mar 2016 – 29 Mar 2016
Municipalities hit: 2; chiefdoms
Started on: 27 Mar; 2016
Heat detections: 49; in a single hotspot: 265 MW
Average daily power: 569MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 27 Mar29 Mar

Play back 30 Mar 2016

How it evolved, day by day

27 Mar 28 Mar 29 Mar 30 Mar

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

This area had burned before

No earlier perimeters overlap this fire since 2016, when the satellite record begins.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 0.7% of the area of London (12 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

Bagruwa

611 ha reached on 28 Mar

0.7 %
Lower Banta where it started

579 ha reached on 27 Mar

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 · 20 Mar 2016

After · 5 Apr 2016

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 · 49Every 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 Sierra Leone ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Lower Banta fire last?: GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 27 March 2016 and 29 March 2016: 3 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 1,182 hectares (11.8 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire entered 2 municipalities: Bagruwa (611 ha, 0.7 %); Lower Banta (579 ha, 1.2 %).
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Sierra Leone (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 from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 49 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 ADM3 (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.

Where it burned