Louisiana Fire Map: Track Louisiana Wildfires Live in 2026

A Louisiana fire map has to handle a state that normally burns 20,000 to 30,000 acres a year but, in the record 2023 drought, lost roughly 58,000 acres by October, including a 31,000-acre pine-plantation fire and a marsh fire that smoldered underground for weeks. Here is how to track one correctly.

What does a Louisiana fire map show right now?

A Louisiana fire map fuses official NIFC incident records and interagency WFIGS perimeters with NASA VIIRS and MODIS satellite heat, NOAA GOES thermal detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts. US Wildfire Tracker renders all four free in any browser, refreshing automatically every few minutes while the tab stays open.

Louisiana's reading challenge is scale swings. In a typical year the state's Office of Forestry responds to roughly 2,000 to 3,000 wildfires burning 20,000 to 30,000 acres. In the 2023 drought, the Office of Forestry logged more than 1,300 wildfires burning almost 58,000 acres by the end of October alone, one of the worst seasons in decades, and 17 parishes declared states of emergency in a single week.

US Wildfire Tracker handles that swing by scoring each detection: whether an official NIFC record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is, and how recent the VIIRS, MODIS or GOES heat is. Weak signals below 25 percent probability are hidden by default, and the app warns explicitly that hotspots can reflect prescribed burns, agricultural fires or industrial heat rather than an active wildfire.

When is Louisiana's wildfire season?

Louisiana runs two wildfire windows a year, according to the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry: August through October, when late-summer heat and rainfall gaps dry out fuels fast, and February through April, when dormant vegetation and frontal winds create a second peak.

Both windows showed up in 2026. Crews fought 44 fires over a single February weekend as a Red Flag Warning and burn bans spread across 16 parishes with wind gusts of 35 to 45 mph, and by midsummer the Brown Ditch and West Blue Crab fires had each burned more than 2,000 acres in Cameron Parish's coastal marsh.

The 2023 season is the reference point for how bad an August-through-October peak can get in Louisiana, driven by a drought that reached the most extreme category on the US Drought Monitor. Our Texas fire map guide and Florida fire map guide describe similar Gulf Coast seasonal patterns, and the mechanics of any state's fire calendar are covered in our wildfire tracking guide.

Which agencies fight fires in Louisiana?

The Louisiana Office of Forestry, part of the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry (LDAF), has primary responsibility for suppressing wildfires on the state's timberland. Wade Dubea serves as State Forester, and the office protects Louisiana's roughly 14.9 million acres of forest land, working alongside 554 rural fire departments statewide.

LDAF's Commissioner of Agriculture and the State Fire Marshal jointly issue statewide burn bans under state law, while individual parishes can set their own tighter rules or opt back into limited burning once conditions ease. During the 2023 emergency, Governor John Bel Edwards' executive order stated there was no exception to the burn ban for any reason.

Parish government runs evacuations. Parish sheriffs issue mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders for their communities, while the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP) activates the State Emergency Operations Center to coordinate statewide response and resources during a declared emergency.

Where do Louisiana wildfires usually burn?

North and central Louisiana's pine plantations carry the heaviest wildfire acreage. Beauregard, Vernon, Natchitoches and Winn parishes sit inside working timberland where a spark from equipment, a burn pile or arson can run for miles in cured pine straw and understory brush once humidity drops and wind picks up.

Coastal Louisiana burns differently. Cameron Parish's marsh grasses ignite fast and spread wind-driven fire across open wetland, as the 2,508-acre Brown Ditch Fire and the 2,295-acre West Blue Crab Fire both showed in July 2026. Marsh fires can also burn into organic peat-like soil once drought lowers the water table, which is exactly what happened east of New Orleans in 2023.

That New Orleans East fire is the state's clearest example of a wetland fire behaving like a soil fire rather than a surface fire. It burned in forested wetland between the Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge and the Michoud Canal, and because it burned at and below the surface, city crews pumped drainage water onto it rather than fighting it with conventional hose lines.

What are the largest wildfires in Louisiana history?

The Tiger Island Fire is the largest wildfire ever recorded in Louisiana. It ignited August 22, 2023 in a wooded pine plantation near Merryville and Singer in Beauregard Parish, burned more than 31,000 acres, forced the evacuation of Merryville's roughly 1,200 residents, damaged more than 20 homes and structures, and was later determined by LDAF investigators to have been caused by arson.

For national context, NIFC's own table shows 77,850 wildfires and 5,131,474 acres burned across the United States in 2025. Louisiana's acreage is a small fraction of the national total in most years, but its fire count can spike sharply the moment drought sets in, exactly as it did in 2023.

What weather drives Louisiana fire danger?

The New Orleans/Baton Rouge NWS office's published Red Flag Warning criteria require all three of the following together: relative humidity below 25 percent, sustained winds of 25 mph or greater, and a Keetch-Byram Drought Index above 700, a near-maximum reading on the index's 0-to-800 scale that signals deep soil-moisture depletion.

That drought index mattered enormously in 2023. By November, exceptional drought — the US Drought Monitor's most severe category — covered 73 percent of Louisiana, the largest area of exceptional drought on record in the state. Governor John Bel Edwards said at the time that "we're not going to get enough rainfall to change conditions on the ground, that's what the National Weather Service is telling us."

Rain remains the variable everyone watches. "Any kind of rainfall we can get, especially when it's widespread like this, is very beneficial to the area," said Doug Cramer, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Lake Charles, describing the relief that finally arrived in November 2023 after months of fire danger.

What happened in Louisiana's record 2023 fire season?

Louisiana's 2023 wildfire season is the benchmark against which every later season is measured. Triple-digit heat, an entrenched drought and downed timber left over from hurricanes Laura, Delta and Ida combined to turn ordinary ignition sources into fires that ran far beyond what firefighters could contain quickly.

LDAF Commissioner of Agriculture Mike Strain described the danger bluntly on August 31, 2023: "It is literally a tinderbox," he said, adding that the state needed 3 to 4 inches of rain to soak the ground enough to meaningfully cut the risk. He said all 155 of LDAF's firefighters were deployed to the Tiger Island Fire alone, with roughly 1,200 people total responding to wildfires statewide.

The state's response escalated in stages. A statewide burn ban issued August 7, 2023 allowed LDAF-certified prescribed burns and normal agricultural burning to continue; a more sweeping order issued August 25 banned all burning, including agricultural and prescribed fire, with no exceptions, before later being relaxed to let individual parishes opt back in as conditions allowed.

Louisiana's coastal wetlands added a phenomenon few residents had planned for: "superfog," a mix of thick wildfire and marsh-fire smoke with cool, windless morning fog. "Fog is normal in the fall in New Orleans," said Lauren Nash, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in New Orleans/Baton Rouge, who noted that predicting exactly where a superfog event will strike is next to impossible because it depends entirely on wind direction.

How do evacuations work in Louisiana?

Louisiana does not use a Ready-Set-Go or numbered evacuation-level system for wildfire. Parish sheriffs issue plain-language mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders instead, and both terms were used during the Tiger Island Fire: officials first urged a voluntary evacuation of Merryville, then issued a MANDATORY EVACUATION order for named roads east of Seth Cole Road once the fire jumped Highway 110.

The Beauregard Parish Sheriff's Office enforced those orders on the ground. Deputies went door to door in threatened neighborhoods to warn residents ahead of any formal order, and nursing homes in DeRidder were evacuated as a precaution because of how fast the fire was moving, even outside the mandatory zone.

GOHSEP activated the State Emergency Operations Center to coordinate resources as wildfires spread statewide. Seventeen parishes had declared a local state of emergency by late August 2023, even though Governor Edwards stressed that wildfire risk extended well beyond those seventeen to the entire state.

How do you track Louisiana fires in under a minute?

The Louisiana workflow is about telling a fast-moving pine or marsh fire from routine agricultural smoke, and about catching drought escalation before it becomes a statewide burn ban.

1. Open the live fire map and filter to Louisiana, or use "fires near me" to list incidents within a set distance in miles of your location.
2. Read the probability tier first. Coastal Cameron and Vermilion parish detections with no NIFC record attached are often legal agricultural burning tied to rice and sugarcane fields.
3. Compare "Last NIFC update", "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat." A marsh fire can keep producing heat signatures for weeks after its surface perimeter looks contained.
4. Check acres and containment together, especially for pine-plantation fires, which can jump from contained to escaped within hours under 25-mph-plus winds.
5. Look for a Red Flag Warning polygon over the same ground, and note whether the Keetch-Byram Drought Index is climbing toward the 700 threshold that Louisiana forecasters treat as critical.
6. For evacuation status, go to your parish sheriff's office or GOHSEP, and use the directions-away links if you need to leave.

The general mechanics behind those layers, including how often each feed updates, are covered in our fire tracker guide, and our current wildfires guide explains how to interpret a national view alongside a single state like Louisiana.

What does wildfire smoke do to Louisiana air quality?

Louisiana's marsh and pine fires create a smoke problem the EPA's Air Quality Index alone does not fully capture. On the index, 0 to 50 is good and poses little risk, 101 to 150 means sensitive groups may be affected, and 201 to 300 is a health alert where risk increases for everyone. During the 2023 drought, wildfire and marsh-fire smoke combined with fog on windless mornings to create "superfog," a phenomenon distinct from ordinary smoke haze that can drop visibility to near zero within seconds on Gulf Coast roadways.

That combination is why Louisiana emergency agencies pair AQI-style guidance with driving warnings during active fire seasons. The New Orleans East wetland fire in October 2023 prompted the city to warn specifically about overnight and early-morning visibility, not just respiratory risk, because dense smoke and fog together behave differently from smoke alone.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Louisiana Fire Map