FIREWATCHER

Central Oregon fire archive

Every wildfire FireWatcher has recorded inside its coverage area — a 100-mile circle around Prineville, Oregon — with what was reported while it burned and what it looked like at the end. NIFC deletes a fire from its active feed the moment it is out, so this archive exists because something had to keep the record.

Burning now

By season

SeasonFires recordedAcresFirst reportedLast reported
2026 1771,133,728 2026-04-112026-09-10

What this archive is and is not

It is a record of what the National Interagency Fire Center published while each fire was burning, observed every five minutes and kept afterwards. It is not an official record and it is not a report of final acreages: NIFC's final-acreage field is almost never populated for fires in this region, so the figure kept here is the largest size ever observed on the feed. Where a fire has no page, it was small enough that a page would have been one line of feed data — those fires are listed on their season index.

How a fire gets into this archive

Every five minutes FireWatcher reads the interagency fire feed for the circle around Prineville. A fire has to appear in two consecutive readings before it is recorded at all, because a single glitched response should not be able to invent an incident. From then on its size, containment and assigned personnel are re-read on that same cadence, and a new entry is kept only when one of those figures actually moves — so the history is a record of changes rather than hundreds of identical rows a day.

Fires are not removed when they end. NIFC deletes a fire from its active feed once it is out, which is the reason this archive exists, and a fire that leaves the feed keeps its page and its address here permanently. A fire is only described as out when there is an authoritative out date for it; otherwise the page says it is no longer listed as active, because a fire vanishing from a feed and a feed failing to report a fire look identical from the outside. Two hours of consecutive absence are required before anything is called inactive, and a reading that loses a large fraction of the fire list is discarded rather than believed.

Sizes are the largest figure ever observed rather than the most recent one. Acreage in the official feed is frequently revised downward as a fire is properly mapped, and a page that already exists should not disappear because a number moved. Distances are computed here from each fire's published point of origin to the middle of each town, which is close enough to be useful and not a substitute for anything your county tells you.

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