US Wildfire Tracker
New York Fire Map: Track NY Wildfires Live (2026)
A New York fire map has to cover a state most people do not think of as wildfire country, until the autumn of 2024 proved otherwise. The Jennings Creek fire burned 5,304 acres across the New York-New Jersey line that November, New York's largest wildfire since 2008, during a historic drought.
What does a New York fire map show right now?
A New York 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 live view. US Wildfire Tracker shows all four free in any browser, refreshing every few minutes while the tab stays open.
New York's wildfire pattern is usually small and quiet: DEC Forest Rangers extinguished 202 wildfires covering 840 acres statewide in 2025. Then late 2024 showed what an extreme drought year looks like instead, when the Jennings Creek fire alone burned more than 2,700 acres on the New York side of the state line.
US Wildfire Tracker scores every detection on whether an official NIFC record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is and how recent the satellite heat is. Weak signals under 25 percent probability are hidden by default, and the app states plainly that hotspots can reflect a permitted prescribed burn or industrial heat rather than a wildfire.
That gap between a quiet baseline year and a record drought year is exactly why a live map matters more in New York than the state's average statistics suggest: the 2025 total of 840 acres sits nowhere near the roughly 6,500 acres DEC rangers fought in 2024, and conditions can flip fast.
When is New York's wildfire season?
New York's core wildfire risk window is spring, matching a statewide rule rather than just a weather pattern: since 2009 the DEC has banned residential brush burning every year from March 16 through May 14, precisely because debris burning is the single largest cause of spring wildfires in the state.
DEC Commissioner Amanda Lefton explained the reasoning behind the 2026 ban: "Many of us are looking forward to spring weather after a very cold winter, but with the warming temperatures comes increased fire risk. That's why we're once again asking all New Yorkers to abide by the two-month-long burn ban," adding that care with fire helps "protect our communities and natural resources as well as our Forest Rangers and firefighters across the state."
Outside that statutory window, New York's open-fires regulation (6 NYCRR Part 215) prohibits open burning statewide year-round unless a fire meets a specific exemption, such as a contained campfire under 3 feet high and 4 feet across burning only charcoal or clean, dry, untreated wood; burning household trash is banned outright.
That two-season pattern mirrors what our New Jersey fire map guide describes for the same fall 2024 drought, since Jennings Creek itself burned on both sides of the state line.
Which agency fights fires in New York?
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's Division of Forest Protection, through its Forest Rangers, is the lead wildland firefighting agency. Forest Rangers have served the state for more than 100 years, combining wildfire suppression with search-and-rescue and state land law enforcement.
Today the force numbers 153 rangers, lieutenants, captains and directors, protecting 5 million acres of state-owned land and easements statewide, including more than 3 million acres inside the Adirondack Park alone — the largest single concentration of their responsibility.
| Organization | Role |
|---|---|
| DEC Forest Rangers | Wildland suppression statewide, brush-ban enforcement, volunteer and local fire department training, incident command |
| Local and volunteer fire departments | Structure protection, first response and mutual aid; nearly all of the 427 companies in the Jennings Creek response were volunteer-based |
| County emergency management / village officials | Evacuation orders, shelters, county- and village-level emergency declarations |
| National Weather Service (ALY, BGM, BUF, BTV, OKX) | Fire weather forecasts, Fire Weather Watches and Red Flag Warnings for their New York zones |
Rangers are assigned to live within their patrol territory, and each is trained and equipped for immediate response to a wildfire report, in addition to planning suppression operations and supervising other wildland firefighting forces during a larger incident.
Why do the Adirondacks have fire towers?
The Adirondacks have fire towers because two catastrophic fire seasons, in 1903 and 1908, forced New York to build a detection network almost from scratch. The Great Fire of 1903 alone burned more than 600,000 acres across the Adirondack and Catskill regions over roughly six weeks, driven by a 72-day drought after a dry spring; smoke reached Albany, about 150 miles south.
1908 was worse in a different way: fires burned on and off for four months, driven by sparks from steam locomotives igniting logging slash that companies routinely left unlimbed on the forest floor. The Long Lake West fire, ignited September 9, 1908 by a passing Mohawk and Malone Railroad locomotive, destroyed an entire community — now the hamlet of Sabattis — including homes, a church and a school, with heat intense enough to melt nails and twist rail.
Combined, the 1903 and 1908 fires consumed nearly 1 million acres and forced reform: 1909 laws required locomotives to burn oil instead of coal during fire season and made logging companies limb their debris. Within a year, wooden lookout platforms with primitive telephones went up on six Adirondack summits, and the first true Adirondack fire tower was built on Mount Morris near Tupper Lake in 1909.
More than 120 towers eventually stood across the state, 57 of them inside the Adirondack Park's Blue Line boundary, until aircraft detection made most towers obsolete by the 1970s and the last Adirondack tower went unstaffed by 1990. Volunteers, DEC staff and local governments have since restored many of them — every one of the five remaining Catskill towers was reopened to the public by 2000 — and a network of more than 100 volunteer summit stewards now greets hikers at restored towers from May through October.
What are the largest wildfires in New York history?
New York's largest fires on record are Adirondack events from the early 1900s, well before satellite tracking existed; the modern era's benchmark is the 2024 Jennings Creek fire, which DEC and Governor Hochul's office both described as the state's largest wildfire since 2008.
| Fire / event | Year | Acres | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Great Fire of 1903 | 1903 | ~600,000 | 643 individual fires across the Adirondack and Catskill regions over about six weeks; smoke reached Albany |
| 1908 Adirondack fires | 1908 | Combined with 1903, ~1 million | Burned intermittently for four months; Long Lake West fire destroyed the community now known as Sabattis |
| Jennings Creek fire | 2024 | 5,304 (NY + NJ); ~2,700+ in NY | Orange County, NY and Passaic County, NJ; New York's largest wildfire since 2008; 1 death |
Between the 1908 reforms and 2024, New York's fire record is largely one of successful suppression: DEC's own comparison shows 2024's roughly 6,500 acres burned statewide was already unusual, and it still sits far below the six-figure Adirondack fires of a century earlier — a gap that reflects the fire-tower-and-ranger system built directly in response to 1903 and 1908.
What happened in the 2024 Jennings Creek fire?
The Jennings Creek fire started November 8, 2024, near Greenwood Lake, spanning Orange County, New York and Passaic County, New Jersey, during a record-dry October that left three-quarters of New Jersey and parts of New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania in severe to extreme drought.
The fire grew fast enough that on a Saturday evening, wind pushed it across a containment line; the Village of Greenwood Lake issued a voluntary evacuation order at 8:30 p.m. for homes on Edgemere Avenue, expanded 55 minutes later to the private Wah-ta-Wah Park community, covering more than 165 houses in total, according to local reporting. A shelter opened at Greenwood Lake Middle School in Monroe.
More than 1,300 firefighters and 427 fire companies, nearly all volunteer-based, responded, alongside the DEC, the Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, the New York Army National Guard, the New Jersey Forest Fire Service and crews from Colorado and Montana. Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters and State Police Huey helicopters dropped more than 500,000 gallons of water in a single week; bulldozers cut fire lines on the ground.
An 18-year-old New York State Parks and Recreation employee, Dariel Vasquez, died while helping fight the fire — the human cost behind a wildfire season most of the state had not expected. Final acreage reached 5,304 across both states, with Sterling Forest State Park reopening for hiking and hunting outside the burned zone once containment was confirmed.
What weather drives New York fire danger?
Five National Weather Service offices share fire weather responsibility for New York: Albany (ALY) for the upper Hudson Valley and eastern Adirondacks, Binghamton (BGM) for the Southern Tier, Buffalo (BUF) for western New York, Burlington, Vermont (BTV) for the northern Adirondacks and North Country, and New York (OKX) for the lower Hudson Valley, New York City and Long Island.
Issuance schedules vary: ALY issues fire weather forecasts twice daily year-round, BGM three times daily, BUF every three hours during fire season only, and BTV twice daily during fire season. Each office can independently post a Fire Weather Watch or Red Flag Warning for its own zones when wind, humidity and drought align.
A Red Flag Warning, in NWS's standard definition, signals "imminent danger of severe fire weather with a relatively high probability of occurrence," typically issued less than 12 hours ahead of the event. The fall 2024 outbreak that produced Jennings Creek followed exactly that pattern: a record-dry October layered onto unusually warm November temperatures.
How do evacuations work in New York?
New York has no statewide tiered wildfire evacuation system comparable to the West's Ready-Set-Go framework. Evacuation decisions are made locally — often at the village or town level — in coordination with county emergency management and DEC Forest Rangers acting as incident commanders.
The Jennings Creek response showed the pattern in practice: the Village of Greenwood Lake itself issued a plain-language "voluntary evacuation order" for specific streets and a private community once wind pushed the fire across a containment line, rather than a county- or state-issued mandatory order. Firefighters credited that voluntary evacuation with helping them protect more than 160 homes.
Shelters are typically opened at local schools, as with Greenwood Lake Middle School during Jennings Creek, and pets are generally accommodated. Because New York's evacuation authority sits close to the local level, residents in fire-prone areas like the Adirondack and Catskill foothills or the lower Hudson Valley's wooded suburbs should follow their own village or town's alert channels rather than assume one statewide system covers them.
For households near the Jennings Creek burn scar or similar wooded border communities, our fire tracker near me guide covers setting a location-based alert radius so a fast-moving fire is visible before a village-level evacuation order is issued.
How do you track New York fires in under a minute?
Checking a New York fire map takes under a minute once you know what to look for. US Wildfire Tracker is free, needs no account, and works in any browser or as a Chrome side-panel extension.
- Open wildfire-map.org and filter the national view to New York.
- Check the fire probability tier before assuming an Adirondack or Catskill hotspot is a wildfire — some low-confidence detections are permitted prescribed burns or industrial heat.
- Open a fire's detail card for acres, percent contained, discovery age, managing organization, and "Last satellite heat" and "Last NIFC update" timestamps.
- Turn on "fires near me" with location sharing for a distance-based list around the Adirondacks, Catskills or the lower Hudson Valley.
- Watch for an active NWS Red Flag Warning banner from ALY, BGM, BUF, BTV or OKX, which signals elevated fire weather even before a fire starts.
- Use the built-in directions link to Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze if you need a route away from an active fire, and always follow local evacuation orders first.
The Chrome extension, listed in the Chrome Web Store as "Fire Tracker," opens the same map in a side panel so it stays visible while browsing; get it at the Chrome Web Store. For more on the underlying data feeds, see our wildfire tracking guide.
What does wildfire smoke do to New York air quality?
New York's own wildfires can degrade local air quality quickly, as they did around Greenwood Lake and the lower Hudson Valley during Jennings Creek, and New York City itself saw a record number of wildfire reports, including a two-alarm Prospect Park brush fire, between late October and mid-November 2024 — enough that Mayor Eric Adams banned all outdoor grilling in the city on November 9.
The EPA's Air Quality Index runs from Good (0–50, "little or no risk") through Moderate (51–100) to Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups (101–150), Unhealthy (151–200), Very Unhealthy (201–300) and Hazardous (301 and up, "everyone is more likely to be affected"). New York has also been repeatedly affected by long-range smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires in recent summers, independent of its own fire activity.
US Wildfire Tracker layers a smoke and air-quality overlay on the same live map as the fire data, so a household anywhere in New York, from the Adirondacks to Long Island, can check current smoke conditions in one view; see our forest fire smoke tracker guide for how the overlay is built.
We built US Wildfire Tracker for exactly what New York showed in the fall of 2024: a state most people don't associate with wildfire risk can still produce its biggest fire in sixteen years within weeks of a record-dry month. Our fire probability score exists so a household near the Adirondacks or Greenwood Lake can tell routine smoke from a fire spreading toward them.The US Wildfire Tracker team — builders of the wildfire-map.org live map and Chrome extension
Frequently asked questions about the New York fire map
Is there a New York fire map I can check for free right now?
Yes. US Wildfire Tracker at wildfire-map.org is free, needs no account, and combines official NIFC incident data with NASA and NOAA satellite heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts, filterable to New York alone.
What was the Jennings Creek fire?
The Jennings Creek fire started November 8, 2024 near Greenwood Lake, burning across Orange County, New York and Passaic County, New Jersey during a record drought. It reached 5,304 acres and was fully contained November 22, New York's largest wildfire since 2008; one Parks employee died fighting it.
Why does New York have fire towers in the Adirondacks?
Two catastrophic fire seasons, 1903 (about 600,000 acres) and 1908 (four months of intermittent burning), forced New York to build a lookout network. More than 120 towers eventually stood statewide; many are now restored by volunteers as historic hiking destinations rather than active fire detection.
When is New York's annual burn ban?
New York bans residential brush burning statewide every year from March 16 through May 14, in effect since 2009, because debris burning is the single largest cause of spring wildfires. Open burning is otherwise restricted year-round under state regulation 6 NYCRR Part 215 outside narrow exemptions.
Who fights wildfires in New York?
The DEC's Division of Forest Protection, through its Forest Rangers, leads wildland firefighting. The force numbers 153 rangers, lieutenants, captains and directors protecting 5 million acres of state land, with local and volunteer fire departments providing structure protection and mutual aid.
Does New York use Ready-Set-Go evacuation levels?
No. New York has no statewide tiered evacuation system. Local villages or towns issue plain-language evacuation orders, as Greenwood Lake did during the 2024 Jennings Creek fire, coordinated with county emergency management and DEC Forest Rangers.
What is the largest wildfire in New York history?
The Great Fire of 1903 remains New York's largest on record, burning about 600,000 acres across the Adirondacks and Catskills. In the modern era, the 2024 Jennings Creek fire (5,304 acres across New York and New Jersey) was the state's largest wildfire since 2008.
Track fires near you in real time
Filter the live map to New York to see official incidents, satellite heat and active Red Flag Warnings from ALY, BGM, BUF, BTV and OKX in one view.