North Dakota Fire Map: Track Wildfires Live in 2026

A live North Dakota fire map combines official incident records, satellite heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts in one view. North Dakota is grassland and Badlands fire country, where wind-driven fires can outrun containment in hours, and this page covers the state's agencies, its worst fire outbreak on record and how to read a fast-moving fire.

What does a North Dakota fire map show right now?

A North Dakota fire map layers official incident records, mapped perimeters, satellite thermal detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts. In a state where 357 mostly volunteer fire departments handle initial attack, those layers can disagree sharply during a fast-moving grass fire.

Incident records carry the confirmed numbers: fire name, acres, percent contained, incident type and managing organization. A rural North Dakota fire report can lag well behind the fire itself, since it is filed by a volunteer department between calls rather than continuously.

Satellite detections close that gap. NASA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments and NOAA's GOES satellites report heat within minutes to a few hours. On the live map, each detection carries a probability tier based on whether an official record is linked and how recent the perimeter and heat signals are.

When is North Dakota's wildfire season?

North Dakota has no single official fire-season calendar, but state agencies describe spring as the defining window: "Fire season has arrived in North Dakota," State Forester Tom Claeys said in a Nebraska Forest Service-style spring advisory, noting that over 90 percent of the state's wildland fires are human-caused. State agencies have separately warned of an earlier and longer spring fire season in recent years.

Fall carries real risk too. North Dakota's worst fire event on record struck in October 2024, and a statewide fire emergency declared August 7, 2026 extended heightened readiness through December 1 of that year as drought expanded from under 2 percent of the state to more than 56 percent in three months.

Which agencies fight fires in North Dakota?

The NDSU-North Dakota Forest Service runs the state's Fire Management Program, supporting North Dakota's 357 fire departments with cost-share funding, training, surplus federal equipment and fire danger signage. State Forester Tom Claeys leads the agency, which stages engines and personnel in high-risk areas during active outbreaks.

Initial attack is almost always local. The Office of the North Dakota Fire Marshal, a division of the North Dakota Insurance Department, investigates the origin and cause of major fires; in November 2024 it found that heat from oil and gas well flares, combined with high wind and dry vegetation, had caused two of the October 2024 wildfires.

The North Dakota Department of Emergency Services runs the State Emergency Operations Center during major fires, coordinating county and tribal emergency managers, first responders and, when needed, the North Dakota National Guard. NDDES also publishes a daily ND Fire Danger Map combining fire danger ratings, active Red Flag Warnings and county-by-county burn restrictions.

North Dakota falls under the Northern Rockies Coordination Center's geographic area rather than the Eastern Area or Rocky Mountain Area used by its Great Plains neighbors; federal units in the state dispatch through the Miles City Dispatch Center in Montana.

Where do North Dakota wildfires usually burn?

North Dakota's largest fires concentrate in the western Badlands and the oil-producing Bakken counties: McKenzie, Dunn, Williams, Divide, Burke, Ward, McLean and Mountrail. This rugged, sparsely populated grass-and-brush country combines continuous fuel with the state's highest density of oilfield ignition sources.

The Little Missouri National Grassland and Theodore Roosevelt National Park sit at the heart of this belt, where broken Badlands terrain can both slow a fire's spread in some draws and accelerate it violently on exposed ridgetops during a wind event.

Eastern North Dakota's denser cropland produces more numerous but generally smaller fires, while the Conservation Reserve Program grassland scattered statewide adds heavy, continuous fuel loads wherever it has gone unharvested or ungrazed for several years.

What caused North Dakota's historic October 2024 fires?

A high wind event on October 4-6, 2024, with gusts reported as high as 80 mph in northwest North Dakota, combined with long-term drought to produce what state officials called the worst combined fire situation in North Dakota's recorded history. Six major fires burned across Williams, McKenzie, Dunn, Ward, Divide, Burke, McLean and Mountrail counties.

The Bear Den Fire near Mandaree grew to roughly 25,000 acres, destroying two homes and multiple outbuildings, while the Elkhorn Fire near Grassy Butte in McKenzie County grew to roughly 60 square miles, about 38,000 acres, according to state officials. The outbreak killed Johannes Nicolaas Van Eeden, 26, near Ray, and critically injured a second person.

The Office of the North Dakota Fire Marshal later determined that two of the fires had industrial origins: the Midnight Run Fire near Keene, about 7,000 acres, was traced to heat from a ConocoPhillips gas well flare, and the Dinwoodie Fire near New Town to a Hess flare. Both were ruled accidental, and North Dakota's oil producers voluntarily cut production to reduce flaring risk as the fires burned.

What are the largest wildfires in North Dakota history?

North Dakota does not publish one official all-time ranked list, but the October 2024 outbreak is described by state officials as the worst combined fire event in the state's recorded history, and statewide reporting agencies logged 935 fires and 173,237 acres for all of 2024, according to National Interagency Coordination Center figures.

The 173,237 acres reported statewide in 2024 marks North Dakota's most active recent fire year, driven almost entirely by the single October wind event rather than a season-long pattern, illustrating how concentrated grassland fire risk can be in a single multi-day outbreak.

What weather drives North Dakota fire danger?

North Dakota fire danger runs on wind and drought together. The October 2024 outbreak's closest historical analog, cited by forecasters, was the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, when large fires exceeding 20,000 acres burned across northeast Montana and western North Dakota under a similar wind pattern.

NWS Bismarck, NWS Grand Forks and the far-western reach of NWS Glasgow, Montana, jointly issue fire-weather products for North Dakota under the Northern Rockies Fire Weather Operating Plan, including Red Flag Warnings for critical wind, humidity and fuel conditions. NWS Bismarck issued a Severe Red Flag Warning covering 14 western and south-central counties in September 2026 as drought conditions persisted.

North Dakota's grassland areas are also covered by the regional Grassland Fire Danger Index used across the northern Plains, which weighs wind, humidity and temperature but treats how cured the grass is as the dominant factor in how fast a fire can spread.

How do evacuations work in North Dakota?

North Dakota emergency communications promote the "Ready, Set, Go" framework: Ready means preparing an emergency plan and signing up for local alerts before fire season; Set means staying alert to a nearby threat and packing to leave at a moment's notice; Go means evacuating immediately without waiting for confirmation.

Local, county and tribal jurisdictions issue burn restrictions and evacuation guidance directly, since North Dakota fire response is fundamentally local. During the October 2024 outbreak, evacuation decisions were made county by county as the Bear Den, Elkhorn and other fires shifted with the wind.

How do you track a North Dakota fire in under a minute?

North Dakota rewards speed of reading, because its worst fires arrive as a single multi-day wind event rather than a slow-building season.

1. Open the live fire map and filter to North Dakota, or enable location to see fires within a set distance in miles.
2. Check whether the detection has an official record attached; an unlinked hotspot in the Bakken counties may be a flare rather than a wildfire.
3. Open the nearest incident and read acres, containment, incident type and managing organization.
4. Compare the "Last NIFC update," "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat" timestamps, especially during a high-wind event.
5. Check for Red Flag Warnings across your county and the county upwind.
6. Confirm evacuation or burn-restriction status for your own address with your county or tribal emergency management office.

North Dakota's worst wind events often extend into Montana and South Dakota, so compare with the Montana map, and see our wildfire map guide for how to read perimeters and satellite layers together.

What does wildfire smoke do to North Dakota air quality?

North Dakota wildfire smoke, along with dust from the same wind events that drive its worst fires, is reported through the EPA Air Quality Index used nationwide. A value of 100 corresponds roughly to the short-term national air quality standard for a given pollutant, and the October 2024 outbreak combined smoke with blowing dust to sharply cut visibility across the Bakken region.

Reduced visibility from combined smoke and dust was itself a hazard during the October 2024 outbreak, a factor separate from air quality that emergency managers weigh when deciding whether to close highways. Our smoke and air quality guide explains how those overlays are built from EPA and NWS data.

Frequently Asked Questions About the North Dakota Fire Map