RallyPack Climate Data Report
10 Years of Global Wildfires
A transparent, open-data look at recorded wildfire trends, causes, and the firework-holiday correlation — built to inform prevention policy and press coverage.
What this report counts: large and notable wildfire incidents reported by national and state fire agencies (for example, fires tracked by the US National Interagency Fire Center and CAL FIRE) — not every fire response. Official incident counts are far higher: in 2026, US firefighters alone have responded to tens of thousands of wildfires, most of them small and contained quickly, while only the largest ~100 appear here at any given time. Use this report to compare large-fire trends, causes, and burned area — never as a total count of wildfires.
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Wildfire and water
Fire and water stress reinforce each other.
Drought, heat and wind dry vegetation and make fires harder to control. During major incidents, water sources and municipal systems may be strained, while fire ash and sediment can contaminate watersheds and increase treatment costs afterward. Prepare for evacuation and outages without assuming water, hydrants, shelters or outside assistance will remain available.
Keep the scale honest: wildfire suppression water use is a local, incident-scale strain, not a driver of regional drought. Regional water scarcity is shaped mainly by climate-driven precipitation deficits, heat-driven evaporation, agriculture and municipal and industrial demand. The risk is compounding rather than causal — a drought-stressed water system has less resilience at exactly the moment a wildfire creates urgent operational and recovery demands.
For households
- Store water for your household size, medical needs and animals.
- Plan separately for water-dependent medication, infant feeding, livestock and sanitation.
- Know whether your well pump or filtration system needs electricity.
- Protect stored drinking water from smoke, ash and contamination.
- Never treat hoses, pools or hydrants as a substitute for evacuation.
For municipalities
- Map water sources, pressure zones, hydrants, storage and vulnerable pumps.
- Pre-arrange tenders, portable tanks, backup power and mutual-aid agreements.
- Protect upstream watersheds through fuel treatment and post-fire monitoring.
- Model simultaneous peak demand from fire, evacuation, heat and outages.
- Communicate that drinking-water systems cannot suppress a fast-moving wildfire at community scale.
Sources: Drought.gov (National Integrated Drought Information System)US Forest ServiceUSGSUCLA Luskin Center for Innovation
Methodology. Figures reflect large and notable wildfire incidents recorded by RallyPack, sourced from national and state fire agencies — small, quickly contained fire responses are intentionally excluded, so counts here are much lower than official all-incident totals. Causes are canonicalized for display; raw labels are preserved on each record. Fires that smoulder and re-ignite may be recorded as separate incidents, which can inflate counts — no records were modified to produce this report. Hectares represent burned area across recorded incidents, not a global total. The 1971 data point reflects a single continuously burning industrial gas-field fire, included for completeness.
Sources
Every figure on this report traces back to the agency that produced it. Where RallyPack's own counts are used, the scope of those counts is stated in the methodology above.
- FEMA — Evacuation and shelter-in-place planning considerations, including the 72-hour minimum sustainment benchmark and planning horizons up to 14 days
- US National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) — Large-fire incident data, national wildland fire outlook and human-caused ignition periods
- CAL FIRE — California incident, cause and structure-loss data
- Copernicus EFFIS — European forest fire information system — burned area and fire danger
- NFPA — Fireworks ignition estimates and home fire loss data
- US Drought Monitor / Drought.gov — Drought conditions and wildfire-management sector data
- US Forest Service — Drought interactions with wildfire, water sources and suppression logistics
- USGS — Post-fire water quality, sediment and watershed impacts
- NOAA — Seasonal climate patterns including El Niño and La Niña effects on fire weather
- American Red Cross — Household and evacuation preparedness guidance
- Drought.gov (National Integrated Drought Information System) — Drought conditions and the wildfire-management sector, including how dry fuels raise the probability of large fires
- UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation — Water-system capacity and expectations during wildfire response, and drought-driven trade-offs in emergency storage
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