How long did the Vassako fire last?

According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 January 2017 to 15 January 2017 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 January 2017 to 13 January 2017.

How much area did it burn?

The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 11,295 hectares (113.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.

Which municipalities burned?

The fire only entered Vassako (11,370 ha, 0.5 %).

What was the weather like?

During the fire the temperature reached 38.8 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 33 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, class Extreme.

Where does this data come from?

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

CF · Central African Republic · 2017-01-02 → 2017-01-15

Vassako fire, 2 January 2017 Vassako

Out · last detection 15 Jan 2017, 11:26 UTC

The fire started on 2 January 2017 in Vassako, Central African Republic, and satellites saw it burning for 14 days. Copernicus’s global GWIS system rebuilt a burnt perimeter of 11,295 hectares from heat detections, spread across a single municipality.

It is the 57th largest in Bamingui-Bangoran since 2016 (of 223 with a page). Number 31 in Central African Republic in 2017, of 100.

Compare with…

Suggestions: Vassako · 2016 Vassako · 2016 Vassako · 2022 Vassako · 2024

Burnt area: 11,295ha; GWIS perimeter (Copernicus)
Duration: 14days; 2 Jan 2017 – 15 Jan 2017
Municipalities hit: 1; sub-prefectures
Started on: 2 Jan; 2017
Heat detections: 276; in a single hotspot: 177 MW
Danger at start: 50; Very high · FWI index
Average daily power: 307MW; detected power per day, on average

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 2 Jan15 Jan

Play back 15 Jan 2017

How it evolved, day by day

2 Jan 4 Jan 6 Jan 7 Jan 8 Jan 10 Jan 12 Jan 15 Jan

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

The weather it burned in

39°high

33km/h · peak gust

9%lowest humidity

It had gone 59 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started.

This area had burned before

45% of the perimeter overlaps earlier fires recorded since 2016: 5,135 ha in 2016.

How big is it?

It burned the equivalent of 7.1% of the area of London (113 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

Vassako where it started

11,370 ha reached on 2 Jan

0.5 %

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	Danger (FWI)
2 Jan	37.2 °C	14 %	25 km/h	Very high 50
3 Jan	36.8 °C	12 %	33 km/h	Extreme 50
4 Jan	37.4 °C	12 %	32 km/h	Extreme 51
5 Jan	37.1 °C	14 %	28 km/h	Very high 50
6 Jan	37.5 °C	14 %	24 km/h	Extreme 51
7 Jan	38.5 °C	9 %	25 km/h	Extreme 52
8 Jan	38.1 °C	11 %	28 km/h	Extreme 52
9 Jan	36.5 °C	12 %	29 km/h	Extreme 52
10 Jan	36.0 °C	13 %	26 km/h	Extreme 52
11 Jan	37.3 °C	11 %	26 km/h	Extreme 53
12 Jan	38.1 °C	12 %	30 km/h	Extreme 54
13 Jan	38.8 °C	13 %	33 km/h	Extreme 54
14 Jan	37.5 °C	14 %	29 km/h	Extreme 52
15 Jan	37.7 °C	12 %	30 km/h	Extreme 54
16 Jan after	39.0 °C	8 %	27 km/h	Extreme 52
17 Jan after	38.9 °C	10 %	22 km/h	Extreme 52
18 Jan after	40.0 °C	8 %	28 km/h	Extreme 57
19 Jan after	39.5 °C	14 %	22 km/h	Extreme 53
20 Jan after	39.6 °C	13 %	27 km/h	Extreme 53
21 Jan after	39.2 °C	16 %	25 km/h	Extreme 52
22 Jan after	39.3 °C	14 %	33 km/h	Extreme 56
23 Jan after	39.6 °C	12 %	35 km/h	Extreme 58
24 Jan after	38.8 °C	14 %	26 km/h	Extreme 55
25 Jan after	36.8 °C	28 %	36 km/h	Very high 46

Before and after, from space

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

↔

Before · 26 Dec 2016

After · 22 Jan 2017

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 · 276Every 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 Central African Republic ›

Frequently asked questions

How long did the Vassako fire last?: According to the heat detections seen by satellite inside the perimeter, it burned from 2 January 2017 to 15 January 2017 (14 days). The perimeter dates it from 5 January 2017 to 13 January 2017.
How much area did it burn?: The perimeter GWIS (Copernicus) rebuilt from heat detections is 11,295 hectares (113.0 km²). It is an estimate: official national figures may differ.
Which municipalities burned?: The fire only entered Vassako (11,370 ha, 0.5 %).
What was the weather like?: During the fire the temperature reached 38.8 °C, humidity dropped to 9 % and gusts hit 33 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 54, class Extreme.
Where does this data come from?: From the GWIS (Copernicus) burnt perimeter, NASA FIRMS VIIRS hotspots and the administrative boundaries of Central African Republic (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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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 5 January 2017 to 13 January 2017. 276 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 ADM3 (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.

Where it burned