West Virginia Fire Map: Track WV Wildfires Live (2026)

A West Virginia fire map has to track two narrow, statutory burning seasons a year, not one long summer. The Division of Forestry logs roughly 1,100 wildfires and 38,000 acres in an average year, and most start the same way: a debris pile that got away from someone after dark.

What does a West Virginia fire map show right now?

A West Virginia 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 is open.

West Virginia rarely produces the kind of single fire that dominates a map for days. The Division of Forestry protects nearly 12 million acres of forestland from six regional offices under the state Department of Commerce, and its typical year is hundreds of small starts rather than one megafire.

That changes what a live map is useful for here. The recurring question is not "how big will this get" but "is that smoke column three ridges over a legal after-hours burn pile, a permitted commercial burn, or the one that escaped." The fire probability tier is what separates those cases.

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 permitted debris burns or industrial heat sources common in the coalfields.

When is West Virginia's wildfire season?

West Virginia has two statutory fire seasons written into state code: spring, from March 1 through May 31, and fall, from October 1 through December 31. Both are set by the Legislature, not just announced by the agency, and both trigger the same burning-hour restriction.

Spring is the leaner-fuel, wind-driven season, before tree canopy leafs out and shades the forest floor. State Forester Jeremy Jones said as the 2025 spring season opened that "even though we have had a wet and snowy winter, it doesn't take very long for our fuels to dry out," reporting 29 fires and about 161.6 acres burned since January 1 that year, per a March 2025 News and Sentinel report.

2026 tracked the same pattern at a larger scale: by April 9, 2026, the Division of Forestry had responded to about 475 fires that had burned roughly 3,000 acres since January 1, with officials flagging elevated risk through April 14 as warm, dry, breezy weather dried out leaf litter faster than usual.

Fall fire season follows leaf-fall, when a fresh layer of dry leaves covers the ground and daytime humidity drops. The Division of Forestry's 2025 fall announcement urged residents to "prioritize safety and adhere strictly to our state's burning laws" as the October 1 restriction start approached.

Outside those six statutory months, West Virginia has no formal restricted period, though a severe summer or winter drought can still produce isolated large fires — 1987 and 1991 were both drought years with hundreds of thousands of acres burned outside the usual pattern, discussed below.

Which agencies fight fires in West Virginia?

The West Virginia Division of Forestry, part of the state Department of Commerce and headquartered in Charleston, is the primary wildland firefighting agency. It operates from six regional offices and county-level ranger stations covering all 55 counties.

Retired 42-year Division of Natural Resources forester Robert Beanblossom, now a Society of American Foresters member, has publicly raised staffing concerns: "The Division of Forestry has fewer than 100 employees statewide and that includes clerical staff and vacancies," he wrote in March 2025, warning the agency "is incapable of handling a catastrophic fire situation especially during extreme drought years because it simply does not possess the power, the equipment or the funding to do so."

County and volunteer fire departments handle initial structure protection and often the first response to a reported wildfire before Division of Forestry crews arrive, particularly in the rural southern coalfields where road access is limited. The two work the same incidents under different statutory authority.

Interagency support for a large West Virginia incident routes through federal partners on the Monongahela National Forest and, when needed, national mobilization coordinated by NIFC — a link explained further in our wildfire tracking guide.

Where do West Virginia wildfires usually burn?

Most West Virginia wildfires start on private land in the southern and eastern counties, where steep, forested terrain meets scattered rural homes and narrow access roads. The e-WV Encyclopedia attributes the pattern to debris burning, campfires, railroads, equipment use and downed power lines — not lightning, which starts very few fires in the state.

Arson occurs disproportionately in the southern coalfields, according to the same historical record, layered on top of the debris-burning problem that Division of Forestry releases consistently rank as the single biggest cause statewide.

Debris burning alone accounted for more than 35 percent of all West Virginia wildfires over the past decade, the agency said in its 2025 fall season announcement, and a 2026 spring update put the share of spring fires caused by people losing control of brush piles at about 36 percent.

That geography matters for how a fire map reads here: a hotspot near a coalfield hollow in the fall is statistically more likely to be a debris pile or a suspicious ignition than one in the high-elevation red spruce forest of the Monongahela National Forest to the east, which burns far less often.

What are the largest wildfires in West Virginia history?

West Virginia's worst fire year on record is 1952, when about 638,000 acres burned statewide and 586,000 of those acres burned during the fall season alone, in the state's third-driest year on record according to the e-WV Encyclopedia. Two later drought years, 1987 and 1991, each burned several hundred thousand acres.

Before organized state fire protection existed, the damage was worse still: an estimated 1.7 million acres of West Virginia forestland burned in 1908 alone, a figure the Division of Forestry still cites as the reason the agency exists. Congress's 1911 Weeks Act, which funded state-federal fire cooperation, followed shortly after.

Nothing on West Virginia's record approaches a modern Western megafire in single-event size, but Beanblossom's Gatlinburg, Tennessee comparison — a November 2016 wildfire that killed 14 people and destroyed roughly 2,640 homes and businesses in similar Appalachian fuel types — is the scenario Beanblossom's 2025 analysis points to when arguing the current statistics understate the risk.

What weather drives West Virginia fire danger?

Four National Weather Service offices cover West Virginia's fire weather: Charleston (RLX) for most of the state plus southeastern Ohio, northeastern Kentucky and extreme northwestern Virginia; Pittsburgh (PBZ) for the northern panhandle; Blacksburg (RNK) for southeastern counties; and Sterling (LWX) for the eastern panhandle.

Each office issues area fire weather forecasts roughly twice a day and can post a Fire Weather Watch or a Red Flag Warning for its zones when conditions warrant, drawing on 10-hour fuel moisture observations, fire danger classifications and guidance from the national Storm Prediction Center. Red Flag thresholds are set locally by zone and are not identical across all four offices; see NWS Charleston's fire weather page for the RLX zone's current products.

Low overnight humidity recovery is the recurring driver behind West Virginia's worst fire runs — including 1952 and the March 1950 "Black Monday" outbreak, both tied to unusually dry, windy stretches rather than lightning. Fine dead fuels like leaf litter and grass respond to humidity swings within hours, which is also the physical reason the statutory burning-hour law targets the afternoon.

How do West Virginia's burning-hour laws work?

West Virginia restricts outdoor burning by the clock, not by a statewide ban toggle. During the March 1–May 31 and October 1–December 31 seasons, only vegetative debris — leaves, brush, yard clippings — may be burned outdoors, and only between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m., with the fire fully extinguished by 7 a.m. Daytime burning from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. is prohibited in that window.

Every permitted fire needs a safety strip at least 10 feet wide, cleared down to mineral soil, fully surrounding the burn pile, and it must be attended continuously until out. Small campfires for cooking or warmth are exempt, as is any burning when at least an inch of snow covers the ground. Commercial burning during the restricted hours needs a permit from the local Division of Forestry office.

Negligent fires draw a civil fine of $100 to $1,000 plus a further $200 civil penalty, and the responsible party is billed for the state's full suppression cost — a landowner whose escaped debris fire spreads onto public or neighboring land can owe thousands of dollars beyond the fine itself.

This statutory approach is close kin to Pennsylvania's own burning-hour restrictions during its spring and fall fire danger periods; see our Pennsylvania fire map guide for how that state's rule differs in detail.

How do evacuations work in West Virginia?

West Virginia has no statewide tiered wildfire evacuation system comparable to the West's Ready-Set-Go framework. Evacuation decisions for a wildfire are made at the county level by the local Office of Emergency Management, in coordination with the Division of Forestry incident commander and the sheriff's office, using plain-language evacuation orders and warnings.

County emergency management offices typically push alerts through CodeRED or a similar reverse-911 system, local radio and social media rather than a single statewide app. Because most West Virginia wildfires stay under a few hundred acres and burn in sparsely populated forestland, large-scale mandatory evacuations are uncommon compared with Western states, but they do happen when a fire threatens a hollow with occupied homes and one access road.

The state's 2024 Emergency Operations Plan places wildfire response inside the broader all-hazards framework run by the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (now organized under the umbrella term Emergency Management), which supports county officials rather than issuing evacuation orders itself.

Residents in fire-prone hollows should register for their county's alert system directly, since West Virginia's terrain means a single-road evacuation route can close quickly; our fire tracker near me guide covers how to set a location-based alert radius.

How do you track West Virginia fires in under a minute?

Checking a West Virginia fire map takes under a minute once you know what to look for. US Wildfire Tracker is free, requires no account and works in any browser or as a Chrome side-panel extension.

1. Open wildfire-map.org and filter the national view to West Virginia.
2. Check the fire probability tier on any hotspot before assuming it is a wildfire — many low-confidence detections near populated hollows are legal after-hours debris burns.
3. Open a fire's detail card for acres, percent contained, discovery age, managing organization and "Last satellite heat" and "Last NIFC update" timestamps.
4. Turn on "fires near me" with location sharing to get a distance-based list around a specific hollow or town.
5. Watch for an active NWS Red Flag Warning banner from RLX, PBZ, RNK or LWX, which signals elevated statewide fire weather even where no fire is burning yet.
6. 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 the county's official evacuation instructions 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.

What does wildfire smoke do to West Virginia air quality?

West Virginia's own wildfires are usually too small to push local air quality into unhealthy ranges for long, but the state's mountain valleys trap smoke efficiently, and the bigger driver in recent years has been long-range smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting south each summer.

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"). West Virginia's ridge-and-valley terrain can hold smoke in a hollow well after the source fire itself has died down overnight.

US Wildfire Tracker's smoke and air-quality overlay is layered on the same live map as the fire data, so a household in a valley downwind of an active fire — in-state or from a distant wildfire — can check current conditions without switching apps; see our broader forest fire smoke tracker guide for how the overlay is built.

Frequently asked questions about the West Virginia fire map