If you search “fire near me” right now, two official real‑time maps to check are CAL FIRE’s incident map and the National Interagency Fire Center’s national maps.
CAL FIRE says its Incidents page shows “Ongoing emergency responses in California” and lists active wildfires, acres burned and recent perimeters, and it publishes incident data as CSV and GeoJSON via a public API for developers.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) describes its Maps page as a “gateway to real-time and historical maps” and notes that “Real-time fire perimeters [are] updated daily.”
Both sites are designed for situational awareness rather than immediate evacuation orders: CAL FIRE’s page cautions that its information “is a representation of the existing wildfire situation” and “is not meant to provide up-to-the-minute evacuation or fire behavior information.” NIFC points users to incident-specific pages such as InciWeb for detailed updates.
How to use them: enter your county or zoom to your neighborhood on the CAL FIRE interactive map to see active incidents and recent perimeters, or open NIFC’s national map to view the interagency WFIGS feed of current perimeters across the U.S.
These official feeds power many third‑party live maps and apps, so a search for “fire near me” often returns both the agency maps and derivative trackers; when planning, rely on the agency pages and local emergency alerts for official instructions.
For more on local weather that affects fire behavior, see a related guide on checking tomorrow’s forecast in the U.S.
Sources
- CAL FIRE — provided the Incidents page, active-incident list, data download links (CSV, JSON, GeoJSON) and the site disclaimer about how its maps are updated.
- National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) — provided the Maps gateway page noting that “Real-time fire perimeters updated daily” and links to the WFIGS interagency perimeter dataset and InciWeb pointer.
