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Mazowe fire, July 2019 Mazowe

Out · last detection 26 Jul 2019, 22:40 UTC

The fire started on 22 July 2019 in Mazowe, Zimbabwe, and satellites saw it burning for 5 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,626 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 79th largest in Mashonaland Central since 2016 (of 334 with a page). Number 112 in Zimbabwe in 2019, of 282.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Mazowe · 2016Mazowe · 2017Mazowe · 2017Mazowe · 2016

Burnt area
1,626ha
GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration
5days
22 Jul 2019 – 26 Jul 2019
Municipalities hit
1
districts
Started on
22 Jul
2019
Heat detections
45
in a single hotspot: 110 MW
Average daily power
255MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Jul26 Jul
26 Jul 2019

How it evolved, day by day

24 Jul 2019 · 17 MW · 7 25 Jul 2019 · 728 MW · 29 26 Jul 2019 · 21 MW · 9
24 Jul 25 Jul 26 Jul

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

This area had burned before

53% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 700 ha in 2016, 389 ha in 2017. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 869 ha that had burned before.

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 1% of the area of London (16 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. Mazowe where it started
    1,635 ha reached on 24 Jul
    0.4 %

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 area6.5 ha
Residents≈ 700

Inside the perimeter there were about 6.5 hectares of built-up land and about 700 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

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Jul 2019
After · 2 Aug 2019

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 · 45Every 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 Zimbabwe ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Mazowe fire last?
According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 22 July 2019 to 26 July 2019 (5 days). The perimeter dates it from 24 July 2019 to 25 July 2019.
How much area did it burn?
The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 1,626 hectares (16.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?
The fire only entered Mazowe (1,635 ha, 0.4 %).
Where does this data come from?
From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Zimbabwe (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 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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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 24 July 2019 to 25 July 2019. 45 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
  • We have not matched this page with any official record.
  • 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.