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Walker Fire, February 2024 Le Flore

Out · last detection 27 Feb 2024, 08:09 UTC

The fire started on 22 February 2024 in Le Flore, United States, and satellites saw it burning for 6 days. United States agencies (MTBS / NIFC) mapped an official burnt perimeter of 822 hectares, spread across a single county.

It is the 171th largest in Oklahoma since 2016 (of 284 with a page). Number 244 in United States in 2024, of 371.

The power measured by the satellite is low (3.7 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…
Burnt area
822ha
official perimeter (MTBS / NIFC)
Duration
≈ 6days
22 Feb 2024 – 27 Feb 2024
Counties hit
1
counties
Started on
22 Feb
2024
Heat detections
24
in a single hotspot: 4 MW
Danger at start
12
Moderate · FWI index
Average daily power
8MW
detected power per day, on average

Where it burned

HOTSPOTS BY DAY 22 Feb27 Feb
27 Feb 2024

How it evolved, day by day

22 Feb 2024 · 3 MW · 1 23 Feb 2024 · 7 MW · 2 24 Feb 2024 · 1 MW · 1 25 Feb 2024 · 24 MW · 10 26 Feb 2024 · 6 MW · 4 27 Feb 2024 · 7 MW · 6
22 Feb 23 Feb 24 Feb 25 Feb 26 Feb 27 Feb

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

The weather it burned in

29°high
61km/h · peak gust
16%lowest humidity

It had gone 5 days without rain (1 mm or more) when it started. Rain came after the fire: 3.4 mm on 29 Feb.

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 0.5% of the area of London (8.2 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. Le Flore where it started
    821 ha reached on 22 Feb
    0.2 %

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 2025
Built-up area0.11 ha
Residents< 20

Inside the perimeter there were about 0.11 hectares of built-up land and almost nobody lived there (GHSL 2025, 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. The GHSL 2025 epoch is a projection made from 2020 and earlier data.

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)
22 Feb 26.5 °C 35 % 61 km/h 0.1 mm Moderate 12
23 Feb 20.0 °C 21 % 46 km/h 0.0 mm Low 11
24 Feb 21.5 °C 16 % 27 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 12
25 Feb 25.7 °C 30 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 15
26 Feb 29.0 °C 30 % 48 km/h 0.0 mm Moderate 16
27 Feb 24.7 °C 61 % 58 km/h 0.1 mm Low 10
28 Feb after 20.2 °C 25 % 56 km/h 0.8 mm Moderate 12
29 Feb after 10.7 °C 26 % 41 km/h 3.4 mm Very low 1

Before and after, from space

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

Before · 15 Feb 2024
After · 5 Mar 2024

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 · Copernicus

On 28 February 2024 the air beside the fire reached 13 µg/m³ of PM2.5, but no daily average passed the WHO guideline (15).

PM2.5 peak13 µg/m³
Days over the guideline0 days
PM1021 µg/m³
Optical depth0.46
232425262728
Good Fair Moderate Poor Very poor Extremely poor

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 · 24Every 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 Walker Fire last?
The official perimeter only gives the start date (25 February 2024). The end comes from the heat detections inside the perimeter: it burned until 27 February 2024 (6 days from 22 February 2024), 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 822 hectares (8.2 km²). Other tallies, such as daily incident reports, may give slightly different figures.
Which counties burned?
The fire only entered Le Flore (821 ha, 0.2 %).
What was the weather like?
During the fire the temperature reached 29.0 °C, humidity dropped to 16 % and gusts hit 61 km/h. The fire danger index (FWI) reached 16, class Moderate.
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.

Report an error
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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. 24 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 2025, 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.