About ActSmall · Fire
A public-good wildfire portal: live satellite hotspots, alerts, and one concrete weekend-doable mitigation per place. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to fire.
Mission
ActSmall · Fire exists to make it easier for anyone — a homeowner in fire country, a parent with kids in school district under a red-flag warning, a community group worried about their neighbourhood — to see what is actually burning near them, and to find a low-cost, citizen-scale thing to do about it.
Data sources for fire
The map joins these open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~14:11 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda.
- Active-fire hotspots — (Fire Information for Resource Management System): and thermal-anomaly detections from the past 24 hours, refreshed once a day ( open data, attribution requested).
- Significant wildfire alerts — (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System), the joint EU/UN multi-hazard alert framework. Alert levels (green/orange/red) are based on size, exposed population, and country vulnerability.
- Mitigation catalog — assembled by hand from open-access materials: Firewise USA, the CalFire Ready for Wildfire programme, the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety Wildfire Prepared Home standard, peer-reviewed post-event home-survival surveys (Camp Fire 2018, Marshall Fire 2021), and Australia’s CFA bushfire-survival guides. Each entry links to its primary reference.
- Country borders — Natural Earth (public domain).
- Basemap — OpenFreeMap & OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.
Detections are not perimeters
Satellite hotspots flag heat signatures, not active perimeters. For active perimeters and evacuation zones, follow your local fire authority (CalFire, US Forest Service, Australia’s CFA, etc.). The recommender on this site is a discovery tool, not a substitute for an evacuation order.
If something is wrong
If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.
Where to read more
- actsmall.org/about/ — mission, editorial posture, license
- actsmall.org/methodology/ — how the daily Lambda & link curator work, AI-tooling disclosure
- actsmall.org/privacy/ — privacy, beacon mechanics, log retention
- actsmall.org/terms/ — terms of use & disclaimers
- actsmall.org/contribute/ — how to help open the data, contribute observations, lobby
- Get qualified help — if something has gone wrong