Indiana Fire Map: Track Indiana Wildfires Live in 2026

An Indiana fire map fuses official incident reports, NASA satellite heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts to track a state where wildfires are small, brief and tied to two narrow windows a year. This page explains when and where Indiana burns and how to follow a fire today.

What does an Indiana fire map show right now?

An Indiana fire map layers official incident reports, satellite thermal detections and active National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into a single view. Indiana wildfires are almost always small, so a map built to show fast-moving satellite heat matters more here than one built around large mapped perimeters.

Incident records come from whichever agency responded — usually a rural or volunteer fire department, sometimes the Indiana DNR or the US Forest Service — and carry the numbers people quote: acres, cause and containment. Satellite detections from NASA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments and NOAA's GOES satellites report heat within minutes to a few hours, often faster than a small department can file a report.

When is Indiana's wildfire season?

Indiana runs two short fire seasons rather than one long one. The National Weather Service's Indiana Fire Weather Area Operating Plan puts the greatest wildfire threat from late February through April in southern Indiana, and again from October through early December, with land management agencies and NWS offices adjusting the exact window each year based on fuel conditions.

Both windows share the same mechanism: exposed, cured leaf litter. Spring fires burn dead leaves and debris after snowmelt but before green-up covers the forest floor; fall fires burn the same leaf litter after it drops but before rain and snow wet it down.

Darren Bridges, State Fire Supervisor for Morgan-Monroe State Forest, described the transition bluntly during one dry October: "I'd say the fire risk is moderate to high, but the oak leaves haven't fallen. If it stays this dry, we will have a different scenario with a higher fire danger," he told reporters.

Indiana's fire activity is genuinely small by national standards. Interagency reporting through the Eastern Area Coordination Center recorded 64 wildfires burning 154 acres statewide in 2024 and 30 wildfires burning 38 acres in 2025 — figures that would barely register as a single incident in a western state.

Which agencies fight fires in Indiana?

Rural and volunteer fire departments do nearly all of Indiana's wildland firefighting. The Indiana DNR Division of Forestry's Fire Management Program has shifted almost entirely to a support role, providing training, equipment loans and grant funding rather than direct suppression, because roughly 95 percent of Indiana's wildland fires are already handled by local departments.

The DNR's Fire Management staff still respond directly on state forests and other DNR-managed land, and the agency runs Volunteer Fire Assistance and State Fire Assistance grant programs that fund equipment for the departments doing the actual suppression work. On federal land, the US Forest Service manages fire on the Hoosier National Forest, and the National Park Service manages it at Indiana Dunes National Park.

State forestry agency

Indiana DNR Division of Forestry, Fire Management Program (Martinsville)

Primary suppression

Local rural and volunteer fire departments (~95% of wildland fires)

Geographic coordination

Eastern Area Coordination Center (EACC), a 20-state interagency region

Fire-weather forecasts

NWS Indianapolis and Northern Indiana, plus Louisville KY, Chicago IL, Wilmington OH and Paducah KY along the borders

Six different National Weather Service offices share coverage of Indiana under the state's Fire Weather Area Operating Plan, because the state's borders sit close to several regional forecast offices. Each office issues its own Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches for the counties it covers.

Where do Indiana wildfires usually burn?

Indiana wildfires concentrate in the state's forested south rather than the row-crop-dominated north and central regions, because unbroken cropland simply carries little fire outside a narrow post-harvest window. Morgan-Monroe State Forest, Brown County, the Hoosier National Forest and other hardwood forest blocks in south-central Indiana show up repeatedly in state and federal fire reporting.

Indiana Dunes National Park, along Lake Michigan in the state's northwest corner, is the other recurring location, where dune grass and oak savanna carry fire differently than the hardwood forests to the south. Marion Mason, a public affairs specialist with the Hoosier National Forest, has pointed to the underlying cause across all these landscapes: roughly 80% of Indiana wildfires are human-started rather than lightning-caused, usually escaped debris burns.

Fall leaf litter and dry, cured grass along roadsides and field edges are the most common fuels statewide, which is why county burn bans, rather than large-scale land closures, are Indiana's primary tool for managing risk during dry stretches.

What are the largest wildfires in Indiana history?

Indiana does not publish a ranked list of historic wildfires, because the state's largest fires on record are still modest by national standards, but a few stand out in agency and news reporting.

The 2012 Indiana Dunes fire is the clearest outlier on record. A federal lawsuit alleged the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad started the fire, which burned through 391 acres of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, including habitat where the National Park Service had been trying to reintroduce the endangered Karner blue butterfly, and forced residents of the community of Ogden Dunes to evacuate.

Most other notable Indiana fires, by contrast, measure in single-digit acres. That gap illustrates the state's actual risk profile: routine fires stay small because fuels are limited and departments respond quickly, but wind, drought and a spark in the wrong place can still produce an outlier.

What weather drives Indiana fire danger?

Wind, low humidity and dry fuel combine to create Indiana's Red Flag conditions, the same combination that closed roads and triggered burn bans across the state in October 2024. The Indiana Fire Weather Area Operating Plan, coordinated between the state's National Weather Service offices and land management agencies, sets the numeric thresholds those offices use.

Red Flag conditions require all three factors together: 10-hour fuel moisture (twigs, small branches, cured grass and leaves) at 8% or less, sustained wind averaging 15 mph or more for at least three hours (20 mph or more in northern and northwestern Indiana), and relative humidity at 25% or below for at least three hours.

In October 2024, wind gusts to 30 mph combined with temperatures near 80°F and weeks of dry weather pushed at least 28 Indiana counties into active burn bans at once, according to National Weather Service advisories covering Indianapolis and northern Indiana. Conditions like that can arrive in either fire season, not just the busier spring window.

How do evacuations work in Indiana?

County emergency management agencies and local fire departments handle Indiana wildfire evacuations; the state has no formal staged system like the West's Ready-Set-Go or Washington's Level 1-2-3 terminology. Most Indiana wildfires never require evacuation at all, because they are contained on the order of a few acres, but larger incidents — like the 2012 Indiana Dunes fire that emptied the community of Ogden Dunes — are handled with plain "evacuate now" instructions from the responding county.

Open-burning bans are Indiana's more common protective tool. Any local fire chief can order a burn ban for his or her jurisdiction, and a city, town or county legislative body can impose one more broadly; Indiana's State Fire Marshal and the Department of Homeland Security maintain a statewide burn ban map so residents can check current restrictions by county. For context on how a neighboring state handles the same risk, see our Ohio fire map page.

Because Indiana fires move fast on wind but rarely grow large, the practical guidance from local officials stays consistent: leave immediately if a fire department or sheriff tells you to, and check your county's burn ban status before lighting anything, even yard debris.

How do you read an Indiana fire map in 60 seconds?

An Indiana fire map is most useful checked the same way every time, particularly during the state's spring and fall fire windows.

1. Open the live fire map and filter to Indiana, or allow location access to see fires within a set distance of you in miles.
2. Check whether an official incident record exists; in Indiana's small, fast fires, satellite heat often appears with no agency report yet filed.
3. Read the timestamps — "Last NIFC update," "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat" — since a small Indiana fire can be fully contained within an hour of detection.
4. Check for an active NWS Red Flag Warning or Fire Weather Watch over your county.
5. Check your county's current burn ban status before lighting any outdoor fire, even a normally permitted one.
6. Follow your county emergency management office and local news for evacuation guidance if a fire is active nearby.

The same routine works for fires drifting toward Indiana from neighboring states; see our guide to reading a live US wildfire map for how each layer works, and check the Illinois fire map or Michigan fire map for conditions just across the state line.

What does wildfire smoke do to Indiana air quality?

Local Indiana fires rarely produce enough smoke to affect air quality far from the fire itself, given their small size, but Indiana has repeatedly experienced smoke drifting in from much larger fires elsewhere — most visibly from Canadian wildfires in recent summers. That distant smoke, not local fires, is what has driven Indiana's worst recent air-quality days.

Smoke concentrations, whatever their source, are reported through the EPA's Air Quality Index, which uses six color-coded categories from Good to Hazardous.

Because most Indiana smoke events originate hundreds of miles away, they can arrive with little warning from any local fire indicator. Our smoke and air quality tracker guide explains how to tell a nearby source from a distant one drifting in on upper-level wind.

Frequently asked questions about the Indiana fire map