About FireWatcher

FireWatcher is a free live wildfire map for Central Oregon. It puts every public agency fire feed for this corner of the state on one page so you can answer one question quickly: is anything burning near me, and how close is it?

It is built and run by one person in Prineville. The community here asked for it and paid for the laptop it is built on. There is no company behind it, no paid tier, no advertising and no account — and after 14 August 2026 there is no sign-up either, because the only thing an account ever did was remember where the map opened.

Coverage is roughly 100 miles in every direction from Prineville — Bend, Redmond, Sisters, Madras, La Pine, Sunriver and Warm Springs, across Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson counties. It is strongest in the middle and thins toward the edge.

What it is not

Not official. No agency reviews, approves or endorses this site. It is independent and is not affiliated with NIFC, NOAA, the National Weather Service, ODF or any county.

Not an evacuation service. It carries no evacuation levels or zones. Those come from your county sheriff and OR-Alert. In an emergency, call 911.

Not a warning system. A page you have to open is not a warning. Sign up with your county so something reaches you.

Not a source of truth about aircraft. Aircraft classification is inferred from public ADS-B data — altitude, speed, transponder code and airframe. It is a hint, not a fact.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this site is a public agency feed, credited here and on the dashboard:

• Fire perimeters, names, acreage, containmentNIFC / WFIGS
• Satellite heat detectionsNASA FIRMS · VIIRS NOAA-20
• Red flag warnings and fire weatherNational Weather Service
• Air qualityOpen-Meteo (CAMS)
• Aircraft positionsadsb.lol · ODbL 1.0
• Fire camerasALERTWest · U. of Oregon
• Road conditions and closuresODOT TripCheck

Containment percentages are the official NIFC figures, not an estimate made here. Where this site derives a number of its own — a distance to a town, a bearing, a smoke direction — it is computed from the agency's own coordinates and is labelled as a distance, never as a judgement about risk.

Containment is not the same as out. It is the share of a fire's edge that crews have a line around. A fire can be 100% contained and still burn inside that line for weeks.

When the data is old, the site says so

Feeds fail. When one does, FireWatcher shows the last good figures and tells you they are old rather than quietly showing you a stale number or an empty map that looks like good news. "We cannot reach the fire data" and "there is nothing burning" must never look the same, and on this site they do not.

You can read the current state of every feed yourself at /api/health — it is the same check the operator uses, published rather than hidden.

Add it to your home screen

FireWatcher installs as an ordinary home-screen app — no app store, no account, nothing installed unless you tap through it yourself. In Safari or Chrome, open the share menu and choose Add to Home Screen.

Corrections

Dead links, wrong figures, anything that looks off: karmaproto5@gmail.com.

If a figure here disagrees with your county, your county is right. Tell me and I will fix it.