The fire desk · NIFC, read live
Something is burning.
Here is where.
Every active wildland fire incident in the National Interagency Fire Center’s current WFIGS layer — ranked biggest first, each with its name, its state, its acres, how much of it is contained, what started it and when it was discovered. The feed is NIFC’s own open incident-locations service, the same one its public maps run on, fetched by this page directly and read again every five minutes while you watch.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. A figure here is whatever the incident’s own dispatch has reported into the interagency record — small fires often carry no size or containment at all, and where the record is empty this desk leaves the cell empty rather than printing a zero nobody reported.
every active incident · NIFC’s own figures · read every 5 minutes · drawn by this page’s own hand
The fires
Biggest first. All of it.
The current layer, ranked by the acres each incident has reported — name, state, acres, percent contained, cause and discovery date, with a bullet inked by how contained it is. Fires that have reported no size yet fall to the end, newest first. A row names the fire on the map below and opens its record; the list refreshes itself while you watch and says when it last read the feed.
The fires
waiting for the feed
Not read yet.
The map
Marks on a drawn coastline.
The whole layer at once — one mark per incident, placed by the feed’s own point of origin, sized by reported acres and inked by containment; a fire with no acres reported is the smallest mark, hollow. The frame is the United States with Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico in it, and the coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline — no tiles, no library, just the canvas. Click a mark and the desk names the fire under it.
The map
Click a mark to name the fire under it.
The count
The layer, added up.
The same read, counted three ways: the biggest incident on the board, how many are burning in each state and how many acres they have reported, and where containment stands — drawn as one strip whose widths are the counts. Nothing here is fetched separately; the count and the list are one read of one feed.
The count
Biggest on the board
—
The board
Containment — widths proportional to the count of incidents in each band
By state — incidents, and the acres they report
About
A desk, not a lookout.
The data is the National Interagency Fire Center’s WFIGS Incident Locations — Current layer — the public ArcGIS feature service NIFC publishes on services3.arcgis.com without a key, fed by IRWIN, the interagency record every wildland fire dispatch in the United States reports into. This page asks that service for every current incident as GeoJSON and reads it directly in your browser; what you see is what the record held moments ago: wildfires mostly, plus the prescribed burns and complexes the same record carries, labelled here as exactly what the feed calls them.
The figures are the record’s own and they are uneven. A big incident with a management team reports acres, containment, personnel and behaviour daily; a small one is often logged with a name, a point and a discovery time and nothing else. Where a field is empty this desk shows an empty cell — never a zero, never a guess — and the ranking, the map marks and the state acres use only the sizes that were actually reported. Acres are the incident’s latest reported size, not a measured perimeter.
Discovery dates are shown against your own clock from the feed’s UTC millisecond stamps; hover a row for the full local time. The map’s coastline is traced from Natural Earth’s public-domain 1:110m outline, simplified and carried in the page; it is scenery, not authority, and it draws no state lines. Your chosen kind is remembered in this browser and nowhere else, and what the feed does not say, the desk does not invent.