As of October 4, 2026 (UTC), NIFC WFIGS open data lists 455 current US wildland fire incidents — densest right now: CA (90), OR (72), MT (53), WA (30), AZ (24). Server refresh about every 45 minutes. Always verify with NIFC and InciWeb before travel decisions.
Live USA fire map
Esri World Imagery basemap with incident markers. Larger, redder markers generally mean larger reported acreage. This is not a replacement for evacuation orders — it is a situational map for travel planning and editorial orientation.
States with the most listed incidents right now
| State | Incidents in feed |
|---|---|
| CA | 90 |
| OR | 72 |
| MT | 53 |
| WA | 30 |
| AZ | 24 |
| ID | 21 |
| OK | 19 |
| NV | 16 |
| NM | 16 |
| FL | 11 |
| MN | 10 |
| CO | 8 |
Official sources (always verify)
- National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC)
- InciWeb — large incident narratives
- AirNow — US air quality
- NIFC open data (WFIGS)
- NASA FIRMS hotspot map (satellite detections, different product)
Cite this USA map
Page: https://fanvancouver.com/usa/wildfires/
Machine feed: https://fanvancouver.com/api/fv_us_fires.json
Source layer: NIFC WFIGS Incident Locations Current (public ArcGIS)
Travel context from Vancouver
Most FanVancouver readers plan from Metro Vancouver into the western US corridor. Smoke days hit Seattle and Portland first for us; California fire seasons change whether a YVR→LAX or SFO weekend is outdoors-friendly. Use this map for the national picture, then open a city guide for the trip math:
Western state maps (from Vancouver)
Embed this map
Free embed for blogs and newsrooms (noindex widget):
<iframe src="https://fanvancouver.com/widgets/us-fire-map/" width="100%" height="420" loading="lazy" title="USA wildfire map"></iframe>
· state filter: ?state=WA / OR / CA
· full page /usa/wildfires/
How to read this map without panicking
WFIGS is an incident list, not a danger score. A county with forty listed fires can be a quiet week of lightning starts already contained on national forest land; a county with two fires can be a Santa Ana or east-wind day that closes a highway and a park entrance. Use the count as a season signal, then open the popup: acres, percent contained, and whether the name is a well-known complex. Anything over a few thousand acres near a numbered highway is the one that actually changes a trip.
Marker colour on this page follows reported acreage, not flame intensity. Small yellow dots are the majority of the feed. The large red ones are the incidents InciWeb writes narratives for — those are the ones to cross-check against Caltrans QuickMap, Oregon TripCheck or WSDOT before you leave a hotel in the morning.
Three fire regimes Vancouver travellers actually hit
Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, northern Idaho). Season is short and sharp: July through mid-September, then autumn rain shuts it down. Smoke from the Methow, Okanogan and eastern Cascades is the plume that reaches Metro Vancouver on a northeasterly. I-5 itself rarely closes for fire; US-97, SR-20 and the Cascade passes do. See the Washington and Oregon maps for the filtered layer.
California. Longer and wind-driven. Coastal cities are resilient; Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon and the Sierra highways are not. A park can be open while Highway 120 or 395 is not. If you have an August or September park reservation, the night-before check is Caltrans QuickMap plus the park alert page, not this national count. California map.
Rockies and Southwest (Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana). Different calendar: the Southwest has a pre-monsoon peak, Colorado and Montana run through a dry August. For a Denver or Phoenix weekend from YVR the constraint is almost always air quality on the trail, not a closed airport. AirNow, not the Canadian AQHI, is the index those cities publish.
AirNow versus the number on your Canadian phone
US apps report AQI (0–500). Canadian apps report AQHI (1–10+). They are not the same scale and they are not interchangeable. If you are driving south, switch to AirNow the moment you cross the border or the “moderate” reading you trusted in Vancouver will not match what Seattle or Portland is actually issuing. Environment Canada’s forecast still matters for the plume that is about to arrive here; AirNow matters for the city you are sleeping in tonight.
What we refresh, and what we never invent
Incident locations and the state table on this page come from NIFC’s public WFIGS layer, rebuilt on this server about every 45 minutes. Evacuation orders, road closures and “is my hotel in a zone” questions are not in that feed — those live on county emergency pages, InciWeb and the state DOT. We do not scrape those into a fake national evacuation map. Cite the JSON if you need a machine count; cite the agencies if you need a decision.
