How to use Fire Radar

Fire Radar is designed to be quick to understand: use the filter bar above the map to narrow what you see, click any fire icon or incident card to open the incident details panel, and use the extra buttons in that panel to view the official report, related news or share a Fire Radar link.

Fire type icons

Household

Vehicle

Field / wildfire

Industrial

Other fire

What the main map shows

• Fire markers show known incidents from the enabled fire and rescue service sources.
• Marker colour shows age/status: ongoing, closed in the last 24 hours, 1–3 days old, and 3–7 days old.
• Marker symbol shows Fire Radar's best inferred incident type: household, vehicle, industrial/commercial, or field/vegetation.
• Wind markers show current modelled wind speed and the direction the wind is blowing.
• NASA FIRMS markers show satellite thermal anomalies. They are useful context, but are not automatically confirmed fires.

Location precision guide

Not every official source publishes the same location detail. Fire Radar now labels the mapping precision clearly:

• Street-level — the source or geocoder provided a specific road/street location.
• Locality-level — the incident is mapped to a town, village or district centre.
• Approximate area — Fire Radar only has a broader honest locality/district position rather than a street-level point.
• Location unresolved — Fire Radar has kept the incident in the list but will not invent a map point when the published location cannot be resolved reliably.

Approximate markers are still useful for awareness, but should not be treated as exact incident positions.

Top Summary and Incident Summary

The status row near the top is the Top Summary. The red Active fires now card is clickable and takes you to the Active fires subsection below the map.

The lower card area is the Incident Summary. Active fires appear first. Where the source is nuanced enough, Fire under control / monitoring appears as a separate amber group. Closed/recent incidents then follow by authority. Clicking a card opens the same incident details panel used by the map.

Fire Radar-inferred closure

Fire Radar uses three public states: Active fire, Fire under control / monitoring and Closed. These are not mandatory lifecycle steps: a source may jump directly from active to closed. “Active fire” requires sufficiently fresh evidence; an old page remaining online does not keep renewing that claim. The popup retains the source status and explains Fire Radar’s status basis.

Authority Intelligence Profiles

Fire services publish data in different ways. Fire Radar keeps a profile for each enabled authority describing whether the source is a single-incident page, structured live feed, aggregated shift summary or significant-incident/news source, plus its freshness, completeness, parsing quirks, geocoding rules and trusted news outlets. These profiles drive the authority-specific adapters that standardise the data for the map.

Important caveats

• Coverage varies by authority and by what each service chooses to publish publicly.
• Some incidents may appear in the list before Fire Radar has a precise map location.
• Related-news matches are third-party reporting and do not replace official incident information.
• This website is for public information only and must not be used for emergency decision-making.