US Wildfire Tracker
Maine Fire Map: Track Maine Wildfires Live in 2026
A Maine fire map mostly tracks small, human-caused ignitions during a short spring window, not megafires. The Maine Forest Service logged 852 wildfires burning about 515 acres in 2025, and the state still measures its worst-case scenario against the 220,000 acres the 1947 fires burned around Bar Harbor.
What does a Maine fire map show right now?
A Maine fire map fuses official NIFC incident records and WFIGS perimeters, NASA VIIRS and MODIS satellite heat, NOAA GOES detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into one view. US Wildfire Tracker shows all four free in any browser, refreshing automatically every few minutes.
Maine's fire pattern is a high count of tiny fires rather than a few enormous ones. In 2025 the Maine Forest Service recorded 852 wildfires but only about 515 acres burned statewide — an average well under one acre per fire, because Forest Rangers and local fire departments usually catch escaped debris burns before they spread far.
That changes what a live map is useful for here. You are rarely watching a fire threaten a town; you are usually trying to tell an escaped brush pile from a legitimate burn-permit fire, or checking whether a Red Flag Warning covers your county before you light anything yourself.
When is Maine's wildfire season?
Maine's wildfire danger reporting runs from late March through late November, with the sharpest risk concentrated in April and May before hardwood leaf-out shades the forest floor. Dry grass, last year's leaf litter, low humidity and wind reaching bare ground all combine in that window, according to the Maine Forest Service.
2025 showed a second, unusual peak. Through July, activity tracked the 20-year average, but August brought 251 wildfires statewide — more than double any August in over two decades — as drought pushed daily fire danger to High and Very High across much of the state. By season's end the state had logged roughly 852 fires and 515 acres for the year.
April 2025 alone produced 193 wildfires burning 177 acres, all human-caused and more than a third tied to debris and open burning, the Maine Forest Service reported. That mirrors the spring debris-burning surge described in our North Carolina fire map guide, though Maine's season is shorter and its fires are smaller.
Which agencies fight fires in Maine?
The Maine Forest Service, a bureau within the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry, runs wildfire prevention, detection and suppression statewide through its Division of Forest Protection. Forest Rangers issue burn permits, patrol during high-danger periods and lead initial attack, working alongside roughly 375 local and volunteer fire departments.
Interagency mobilization for larger incidents runs through the NIFC Eastern Area Coordination Center, which coordinates crews and aircraft across the Northeast when a fire outgrows local and state resources. The National Weather Service supports both levels with fire-weather forecasts, spot forecasts and Red Flag Warnings from its Gray and Caribou offices.
| Organization | Role |
|---|---|
| Maine Forest Service | Statewide wildfire prevention, detection, suppression, burn permits and fire danger ratings, under the Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry |
| Local and volunteer fire departments | First response, structure protection and mutual aid on most initial-attack calls |
| NWS Gray (GYX) and Caribou (CAR) | Fire-weather forecasts, Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches, coordinated jointly with the Maine Forest Service |
| NIFC Eastern Area Coordination Center | Interagency mobilization of crews, aircraft and incident management teams when a fire exceeds state resources |
| Maine Emergency Management Agency | Statewide emergency coordination and public alerting during major incidents |
Where do Maine wildfires usually burn?
Most Maine wildfires ignite close to where people live: yards, roadsides and the wildland-urban interface where forest meets subdivision. Escaped debris burning is consistently the leading cause, followed by equipment or vehicle malfunctions and recreational campfires, based on 2025 Maine Forest Service cause data.
Geographically, the state's large unorganized territory in the north and west — where the Maine Forest Service itself issues burn permits directly rather than a town fire warden — carries more remote, harder-to-reach fire risk, while the populated southern and coastal counties see more frequent but smaller incidents.
A August 2025 example: a wildfire near Baileyville in Washington County, close to the Canadian border, grew to about 30 acres before rangers and local departments held it with dozer lines and a burnout operation, reaching 80 percent containment within days — typical of how quickly Maine crews knock down even a larger-than-usual fire.
What are the largest wildfires in Maine history?
Maine does not publish an annual ranked list of its largest individual wildfires the way some western states do; state fire statistics are compiled by year, not by named fire. The one dataset the Maine Forest Service does map by fire name and acreage is the catastrophic October 1947 outbreak, still the benchmark for the state's worst-case wildfire scenario.
| Fire | Acres |
|---|---|
| Shapleigh (spanning 11 towns including Waterboro, Wells, Kennebunk and Alfred) | 109,110 |
| Biddeford | 21,910 |
| Brownfield | 21,120 |
| Centerville-Jonesboro | 19,970 |
| Bar Harbor / Mount Desert Island | 17,188 |
These five are the largest of 16 named fires mapped in the same outbreak, which the Maine Forest Service's own map, sourced to the Irland Group's study of the 1947 Northeastern Regional Fire Outbreak, states burned over 220,000 acres statewide. No modern Maine fire has come remotely close; the entire 2025 season burned roughly 515 acres statewide.
How did the fires of 1947 reshape Maine wildfire policy?
Maine's 1947 fires followed 90 consecutive days of record drought and heat, and by mid-October dozens of small fires merged into an uncontrollable outbreak. The Maine Forest Service's own account puts statewide losses at over 220,000 acres, 1,000 homes destroyed, 2,500 people left homeless, 16 deaths and more than $11 million in damage — figures the agency still calls the largest forest fire disaster in its modern history.
Bar Harbor took the outbreak's most visible hit. About 17,188 acres burned on Mount Desert Island, roughly half of it inside Acadia National Park, destroying 67 of the town's grand "Millionaire's Row" mansions and the homes of more than 100 year-round residents, according to contemporary accounts collected by the New England Historical Society.
The disaster reshaped how Maine organizes firefighting. The state secured a license for a two-way public safety radio network, expanded the forest commissioner's authority to respond to fires, and launched a public fire-safety education campaign. The outbreak also helped establish the Northeastern Forest Fire Protection Compact, the mutual-aid framework that still lets Maine and its neighbors share crews and equipment across state lines today.
What weather drives Maine fire danger?
Maine's Red Flag criteria, set jointly by the Maine Forest Service and the National Weather Service offices in Gray and Caribou, require the average of 1-hour and 10-hour fuel moistures to fall below 10 percent, combined with relative humidity under 30 percent and frequent gusts or sustained winds above 25 mph for three or more hours.
- Fuel moisture
- Mean of 1-hour and 10-hour fuels below 10 percent
- Humidity
- Relative humidity under 30 percent
- Wind
- Frequent gusts or sustained winds above 25 mph for 3+ hours
- Supplemental factors
- Keetch-Byram Drought Index of 400 or higher and temperatures above 50°F may inform the call but are not standalone criteria
Because many Fire Danger Rating Areas straddle both NWS forecast zones, Gray and Caribou coordinate most Red Flag decisions jointly rather than issuing independently. During a Red Flag Warning, Maine's open burning law makes it illegal to burn outdoors anywhere the warning is in effect, regardless of any permit already issued.
How do burn permits work in Maine?
Maine requires a free burn permit for nearly all outdoor burning of brush and debris, year-round, and for any recreational fire with flames taller than 3 feet or wider than 3 feet in diameter. Permits are issued online after 9 a.m. through maineburnpermit.com by local town fire wardens in organized towns, or directly by the Maine Forest Service in the state's unorganized territories.
The permit system doubles as the state's main prevention tool because it is tied to the daily fire danger rating: on High, Very High or Extreme danger days, wardens can restrict or refuse new permits, and once a Red Flag Warning is in effect, all outdoor burning is prohibited statewide in the affected area even with a valid permit already in hand.
Cooking fires in grills or fire pits under 3 feet do not need a permit on your own property, but the same size fire in Maine's unorganized territories, or on land you do not own, still requires one. Burning plastic, rubber, treated wood, tires or other solid waste outdoors is prohibited statewide regardless of permit status.
How do evacuations work in Maine?
Maine does not use a statewide Ready-Set-Go or numbered evacuation-level system for wildfire. Because most Maine fires stay small, evacuation orders are rare and, when needed, are issued locally by town fire departments, county sheriffs or the Maine Emergency Management Agency's county-level partners rather than through a single statewide protocol.
During an active incident, the Maine Forest Service situation updates and local fire department channels are the authoritative sources for road closures and any evacuation instructions, while MEMA coordinates broader emergency response and can activate the Emergency Alert System and Wireless Emergency Alerts for civil emergencies, including immediate evacuations.
If you live near an active wildfire, follow instructions from local fire officials rather than assuming smoke alone means you must leave — Maine's small, fast-attacked fires rarely require the kind of large-scale evacuations seen in western states, but always comply with any order that is issued.
How do you track Maine fires in under a minute?
Because Maine fires are usually small and short-lived, the goal of a quick map check here is context — is this a permitted burn, an escaped debris fire, or something bigger — rather than tracking a slow-moving front for days.
- Open the live fire map and filter to Maine, or use "fires near me" to see incidents within a set distance in miles.
- Check the probability tier. A low tier with no linked NIFC record is often a permitted burn or a small patrol response, not an emerging wildfire.
- Compare "Last NIFC update," "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat" — fresh satellite heat with no official record yet is common for Maine's fast-breaking small fires.
- Check for an active Red Flag Warning before you plan any burning of your own, since a warning overrides any permit you already hold.
- Look up your county's daily fire danger rating at the state's fire weather site alongside the map.
- For any evacuation instructions, follow your town fire department or MEMA channel, and use the app's directions-away links if you need to leave.
Our fire tracker guide explains how each data layer's latency works, and the current wildfires guide covers how to read a national view alongside a state-level one like Maine's.
What does wildfire smoke do to Maine air quality?
Maine's own wildfires are usually too small to affect air quality broadly, but the state is regularly exposed to smoke transported from much larger fires in Canada, which can push conditions from good to unhealthy for sensitive groups within hours even with no fire burning nearby.
On the EPA's Air Quality Index, a reading of 101 to 150 means sensitive groups — including people with asthma, heart disease or lung disease, children and older adults — may experience health effects, while 151 to 200 means some members of the general public may be affected too. Checking a smoke or air-quality overlay matters as much in Maine as checking for a nearby fire.
Our forest fire smoke tracker guide explains how to read smoke plume forecasts alongside a live fire map, which is useful in Maine specifically because the smoke you are breathing may have originated hundreds of miles north.
Maine is a good test of whether a fire map handles small, fast fires honestly. Most detections here resolve in under a day, so we would rather show a low-probability heat signal near a town than silently drop it — and we label prescribed and debris burns as clearly as we can, because in a state where 95 percent of fires are human-caused, that distinction is most of what a resident actually needs to know.The US Wildfire Tracker team — builders of the wildfire-map.org live map and Chrome extension
Frequently asked questions about the Maine fire map
When is Maine's wildfire season?
The Maine Forest Service runs its wildfire danger reporting from late March through late November, with the highest risk in April and May before trees leaf out. A secondary risk period can appear in late summer during drought, as happened in August 2025 when the state saw more than double its typical number of August fires.
Are Maine wildfires mostly human-caused?
Yes. Maine Forest Service data for 2025 puts the human-caused share above 95 percent, with escaped debris and open burning, equipment or vehicle malfunctions, and recreational campfires as the leading causes. Chief Forest Ranger Robby Gross has put the historical human-caused share at over 90 percent statewide.
Do I need a burn permit in Maine?
Yes, for almost all outdoor burning of brush or debris, year-round, and for any recreational fire taller or wider than 3 feet. Permits are free and available online at maineburnpermit.com from your town fire warden, or directly from the Maine Forest Service in unorganized territories. Burning during a Red Flag Warning is illegal even with a permit.
What was Maine's worst wildfire disaster?
The October 1947 outbreak, which burned more than 220,000 acres statewide, destroyed 1,000 homes, left 2,500 people homeless and killed 16 people. The largest single fire, near Shapleigh, burned about 109,110 acres; the Bar Harbor fire on Mount Desert Island burned about 17,188 acres and destroyed dozens of the town's grand estates.
What triggers a Red Flag Warning in Maine?
The Maine Forest Service and National Weather Service jointly issue a Red Flag Warning when the average of 1-hour and 10-hour fuel moistures falls below 10 percent, combined with relative humidity under 30 percent and frequent gusts or sustained winds above 25 mph for three or more hours. It is unlawful to burn outdoors anywhere the warning applies.
Does Maine use evacuation levels like the West does?
No. Maine has no statewide Ready-Set-Go or numbered evacuation-level system. Because most fires stay small, evacuation orders are rare and are issued locally by fire departments or county officials, with the Maine Emergency Management Agency coordinating broader alerts when needed.
Is US Wildfire Tracker an official source for Maine fires?
No. It is a free live map fusing NIFC incident records and perimeters, NASA VIIRS and MODIS detections, NOAA GOES heat and National Weather Service alerts, with no account required. Satellite detections can lag by minutes to hours, so follow the Maine Forest Service and local fire officials for authoritative instructions and any evacuation orders.
Track Maine fires in real time
Filter to Maine, check the probability tier before assuming a heat signal is a wildfire, and see NWS Red Flag Warnings over the same ground.