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Salt Fire, June 2021 Shasta

Out · last detection 6 Jul 2021, 10:01 UTC

The fire started on 30 June 2021 in Shasta, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 7 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 5,091 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 131th largest in California since 2016 (of 442 with a page). Number 89 in United States in 2021, of 385.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Hirz · 2018Delta · 2018Shoe · 2024Fawn · 2021

Burnt area
5,091ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 7days
30 Jun 2021 – 6 Jul 2021
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
30 Jun
2021
Heat detections
454
in a single hotspot: 210 MW
Danger at start
53
Extreme · FWI index
Average daily power
1.1GW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 30 Jun6 Jul
6 Jul 2021

How it evolved, day by day

30 Jun 2021 · 433 MW · 5 1 Jul 2021 · 1,112 MW · 97 2 Jul 2021 · 626 MW · 86 3 Jul 2021 · 1,124 MW · 76 4 Jul 2021 · 3,513 MW · 114 5 Jul 2021 · 553 MW · 67 6 Jul 2021 · 19 MW · 9
30 Jun 1 Jul 2 Jul 3 Jul 4 Jul 5 Jul 6 Jul

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

The weather it burned in

38°high
45km/h · peak gust
12%lowest humidity

It had gone 15 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

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

How big is it?

10 km
It burned the equivalent of 3.2% of the area of London (51 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 county

  1. Shasta where it started
    5,106 ha reached on 30 Jun
    0.5 %

Burnt area inside each county, 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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2020
Built-up area1.9 ha
Residents≈ 60

Inside the perimeter there were about 1.9 hectares of built-up land and about 60 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)
30 Jun 38.2 °C 12 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
1 Jul 36.4 °C 21 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
2 Jul 38.0 °C 16 % 40 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
3 Jul 38.5 °C 15 % 43 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 47
4 Jul 37.1 °C 22 % 41 km/h 0.1 mm Very high 46
5 Jul 38.4 °C 12 % 38 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 48
6 Jul 37.4 °C 19 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 50
7 Jul after 38.6 °C 14 % 28 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 45
8 Jul after 39.7 °C 12 % 34 km/h 0.0 mm Very high 49
9 Jul after 41.2 °C 9 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 53
10 Jul after 42.9 °C 12 % 37 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
11 Jul after 41.9 °C 16 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 54
12 Jul after 41.3 °C 9 % 36 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
13 Jul after 40.1 °C 10 % 41 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 56
14 Jul after 37.2 °C 15 % 45 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 55
15 Jul after 34.6 °C 15 % 42 km/h 0.0 mm Extreme 52
16 Jul after 35.1 °C 17 % 37 km/h 0.2 mm Very high 49

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 23 Jun 2021
After · 13 Jul 2021

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 · 454Every 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 United States ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Salt Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (30 June 2021). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 6 July 2021 (7 days from 30 June 2021), the last day with detections before more than 10 days in a row without any, so it is approximate.
How much area did it burn?
The official perimeter published by United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) is 5,091 hectares (50.9 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Shasta (5,106 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 38.5 °C, humidity dropped to 12 % and gusts hit 45 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 53, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?
From the official burnt perimeter of United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC, public domain), NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of United States. 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: 911 · Emergency number and official warnings ›

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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We will only use your email to reply about this report. Privacy. This is not an emergency service: if there is a fire now, call 911.

How we know this
  • Perimeter: MTBS (US Geological Survey and US Forest Service), official.
  • The official perimeter has no end date: the end is the last day with VIIRS detections inside the perimeter before a gap of more than 10 days (150 days at most), so it is approximate. 454 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.

How we build fire pages: methodology ›

Where this data comes from

The perimeter is official and in the public domain. For past years it comes from MTBS (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity), run by the U.S. Geological Survey and the USDA Forest Service, which map it on Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery. For the current and last year it comes from WFIGS at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC): incident perimeters mapped by fire crews, aircraft and imagery. Heat detections come from the VIIRS sensors aboard Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20, distributed by NASA FIRMS at 375 m resolution. County boundaries come from geoBoundaries ADM2 (Public Domain). The area per county is computed by WorldFires by crossing the perimeter with those boundaries, so it may differ slightly from official figures.