Find fires that threaten you — and harden your home this weekend.
ActSmall · Fire is a free, map-first wildfire portal. The map opens on a place where fires are burning right now — sourced live from NASA satellites — and links every cluster to the proven, low-cost steps that empirically save houses. No accounts. No tracking. Nothing for sale.
Information only.
This site is not fire-safety, insurance, or evacuation advice. For an active fire or evacuation order, follow your local emergency authority. Get help →
Spend a Saturday on defensible space
The headline action for almost everyone in fire country is the same: clear and maintain a 30-foot ring around your house. Empirical post-event surveys after the 2018 Camp Fire and the 2020 California complex fires found that homes with a properly maintained 0–5 ft non-combustible zone and a 5–30 ft lean, clean and green zone were 3–4× more likely to survive a wildfire than identical homes without it — even when the fire reached the property line.
What you do
Move firewood, brush, and combustible mulch out of the first 5 ft. Mow grass under 4 in within 30 ft. Remove dead branches and ladder fuels. Clean gutters and the roof of pine needles. Trim tree limbs at least 10 ft above the chimney and 6 ft up the trunk.
What it costs
$0–$200 — basically a weekend with a rake, ladder, gloves, and (optionally) a small chipper rental. The most effective interventions are the cheapest ones: clearing the deck, the gutters, and the first five feet.
Where it helps most
Anywhere a wildfire could plausibly reach you in the next decade — the (WUI) of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West, southern Australia, the Mediterranean rim (Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Turkey), British Columbia and the Canadian boreal, Chile, the Brazilian Cerrado and Pantanal, the Russian Far East, the South African fynbos, and increasingly the Nordic and Atlantic European boreal forests.
What the map shows
Live active-fire hotspots ()
Every thermal anomaly detected by NASA’s and satellites in the last 24 hours, sourced from the Fire Information for Resource Management System. Points are coloured by sensor confidence; cluster size shows fire-radiative-power.
wildfire alerts
Significant wildfire events tracked by the UN’s Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System — with country, alert level (green/orange/red), and a link to the official advisory.
Country fire weather
Countries shaded by recent active-fire detection density — a coarse proxy for whether fire weather is currently active in your region. Pale areas have no reading in today’s feed.
WUI risk basics
Quick reference for the wildland-urban interface — the band of human development inside flammable vegetation. Firewise classifications inform every action recommendation here.
Cross-link to smoke
Clicking a fire shows the matching air-quality link — because the people most affected by a fire often live hundreds of kilometres downwind, breathing the smoke.
Your own pins
Drop a pin on your home, your kid’s school, your parents’ cabin. Saved only in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
From recognition to action, in one click
Every map click picks the single action most needed based on the live data:
Clear defensible space
If you live in a fire-prone region (active hotspots within 50 km, or any history of WUI fires in your county) the headline action is the 30-ft defensible-space ring — mostly free, dramatically protective.
Get a go-bag ready
If hotspots are active right now within 30 km of you, the action shifts to a 72-hour go-bag: documents, medications, water, N95s, charger, pet leash. A single Saturday once.
Sign up for emergency alerts
If you live in fire country and aren’t signed up for your local emergency-alert system, that’s the headline. Australia has Emergency Alert at the state level; the EU runs EU-Alert via cell broadcast; the UK uses Emergency Alerts; Canada runs Alert Ready; many US counties run on Everbridge or similar opt-in systems. Free everywhere, life-saving everywhere.
See the active emergency response
If a major fire is currently active near a populated area, the recommender surfaces the operator running the response — an national Red Cross / Red Crescent society, an Australian state fire service, the EU’s Civil Protection mechanism, or your country’s national disaster authority — so you can read the situation report straight from the source.
Email a representative
For long-running fire seasons in your region, every primary action carries a one-click Email a representative button on prescribed-burn funding, vegetation management, and WUI building codes.
Tell two people
If nothing acute is signalled, the action becomes multiplication: forward the live view to two more people in fire country via your phone’s share sheet.
Below every primary action sit three small affordances: Mark done (your own private log), 30-day reminder (downloads a calendar event), and Tell two people (your share sheet). Nothing is tracked, gamified, or sent anywhere.
How the data stays current
A small scheduled job pulls the active-fire feed and the wildfire alerts once a day, normalizes the result, and serves a single tiny JSON file to everyone who visits. Your browser only ever talks to our own server for the data layers. Result: same-day freshness, deliberately tiny running costs, and no upstream API gets polled more than its publication rhythm warrants.
Read more in methodology. Source code lives publicly — everything you see can be inspected.