Sandor fire, 31 January 2025 Sandor
The fire started on 31 January 2025 in Sandor, Sierra Leone, and satellites saw it burning for 12 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 1,146 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.
It is the 189th largest in Eastern since 2016 (of 263 with a page). Number 68 in Sierra Leone in 2025, of 103.
The power measured by the satellite is low (9.4 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…
Suggestions: Sandor · 2019Sandor · 2016Lei · 2022Lei · 2020
- Burnt area
- 1,146ha
- GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
- Duration
- 12days
- 31 Jan 2025 – 11 Feb 2025
- Municipalities hit
- 1
- chiefdoms
- Started on
- 31 Jan
- 2025
- Heat detections
- 57
- in a single hotspot: 9 MW
- Average daily power
- 13MW
- 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.
This area had burned before
82% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 545 ha in 2016, 667 ha in 2019, 9 ha in 2020, 441 ha in 2022. Part of it burned more than once, so the yearly figures add up to more than the 943 ha that had burned before.
- 667 ha Sandor fire, February 2019 2,348 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 545 ha Sandor fire, January 2016 3,648 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 441 ha Lei fire, February 2022 2,721 ha in total; the hectares shown are those it shares with this fire
- 9 ha Lei fire, February 2020 1,284 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).
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).
Berlin boundary: geoBoundaries · Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (dl-de/by-2-0).
This compares size, not location: both shapes are at the same scale, north up, centred on each other.
What happened to each town
-
Sandor where it started1,154 ha reached on 29 Jan0.8 %
Burnt area inside each municipality, from crossing the GWIS perimeter with administrative boundaries. The distance is from the town centre 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.
If the day is cloudy, change the date: each satellite passes once a day. In false colour the burnt ground looks brown or red.
The smoke
CAMS · CopernicusOn 9 February 2025 the air beside the fire reached 131 µg/m³ of PM2.5. That day averaged 97: 6.5 times the WHO daily guideline (15).
Particles from the Copernicus CAMS model at the centre of the perimeter; these are not measurements in each town. The pale bar is the worst hour, the solid one the daily average.
Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0) · Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS)
Detections table · 57Every satellite heat detection, one by one, with time, satellite, power and coordinates.
| Date and time | Satellite | FRP (MW) | Lat | Lon |
|---|
Frequently asked questions
- How long did the Sandor fire last?
- GWIS (Copernicus) dates it between 31 January 2025 and 11 February 2025: 12 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 1,146 hectares (11.5 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
- Which municipalities burned?
- The fire only entered Sandor (1,154 ha, 0.8 %).
- 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
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: GWIS (Copernicus), rebuilt from heat detections rather than mapped on imagery.
- Dates from the perimeter: the VIIRS detections inside it did not change them. 57 Suomi-NPP VIIRS detections on those dates.
- We have not matched this page with any official record.
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.