How long did the Ust-Ilimsky fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 8 September 2016 to 28 September 2016 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 15 September 2016 to 28 September 2016.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,230 hectares (92.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Ust-Ilimsky (9,155 ha, 0.2 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 21.4 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 22, class High.

Where does this data come from?

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

RU · Russia · 2016-09-08 → 2016-09-28

Ust-Ilimsky fire, 8 September 2016 Ust-Ilimsky

Out · last detection 28 Sept 2016, 05:38 UTC

The fire started on 8 September 2016 in Ust-Ilimsky, Russia, and satellites saw it burning for 21 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 9,230 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 126th largest in Irkutsk Oblast since 2016 (of 428 with a page). Number 226 in Russia in 2016, of 692.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Ust-Ilimsky · 2016 Ust-Ilimsky · 2016 Усть-Кутский район · 2016 Нижнеилимский район · 2016

Burnt area: 9,230ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 21days; 8 Sept 2016 – 28 Sept 2016
Municipalities hit: 1; districts
Started on: 8 Sept; 2016
Heat detections: 1,130; in a single hotspot: 90 MW
Danger at start: 14; Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power: 397MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 8 Sept28 Sept

Play back 28 Sept 2016

How it evolved, day by day

8 Sept 15 Sept 18 Sept 21 Sept 24 Sept 27 Sept

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

The weather it burned in

21°high

44km/h · peak gust

25%lowest humidity

It had gone 4 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 10.1 mm on 29 Sept.

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 5.8% of the area of London (92 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

Ust-Ilimsky where it started

9,155 ha reached on 8 Sept

0.2 %

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.

People and buildings inside the perimeter

GHSL 2015

Built-up area< 0.1 ha

Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there was no noticeable built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2015, 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)
8 Sept	18.9 °C	36 %	21 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
9 Sept	19.5 °C	28 %	22 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
10 Sept	21.4 °C	36 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 15
11 Sept	19.6 °C	50 %	23 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
12 Sept	18.5 °C	34 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 16
13 Sept	17.7 °C	28 %	36 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 18
14 Sept	18.3 °C	26 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
15 Sept	19.0 °C	26 %	37 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 21
16 Sept	19.6 °C	30 %	38 km/h	0.0 mm	High 21
17 Sept	21.1 °C	27 %	30 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 20
18 Sept	20.1 °C	25 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	High 22
19 Sept	15.6 °C	61 %	32 km/h	1.9 mm	Very low 4
20 Sept	13.5 °C	48 %	34 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 8
21 Sept	13.6 °C	50 %	35 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 10
22 Sept	11.0 °C	46 %	28 km/h	0.0 mm	Low 11
23 Sept	8.4 °C	51 %	41 km/h	0.2 mm	Moderate 13
24 Sept	9.5 °C	36 %	44 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 16
25 Sept	6.7 °C	37 %	33 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
26 Sept	8.1 °C	38 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
27 Sept	10.5 °C	42 %	31 km/h	0.0 mm	Moderate 14
28 Sept	9.8 °C	43 %	31 km/h	0.3 mm	Moderate 14
29 Sept after	4.6 °C	76 %	30 km/h	10.1 mm	Very low 0

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 1 Sept 2016

After · 5 Oct 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 · 1,130Every 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 Russia ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Ust-Ilimsky fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 8 September 2016 to 28 September 2016 (21 days). The perimeter dates it from 15 September 2016 to 28 September 2016.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 9,230 hectares (92.3 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Ust-Ilimsky (9,155 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 21.4 °C, humidity dropped to 25 % and gusts hit 44 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 22, class High.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Russia (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

NASA FIRMS ↗
GWIS · Copernicus ↗

History of this page · 1 Changes in area, dates, name, official record or merged pages, compared every night since 24 October 2026.

25 October 2026 Start date: 15 September 2016 → 8 September 2016.

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 really happened?

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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 112.

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 15 September 2016 to 28 September 2016. 1,130 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 2015, 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 (Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0). 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