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Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone.Jack London after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire
This article is a list of notable fires.
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Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed. San Francisco is gone.Jack London after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire
This article is a list of notable fires.
This is a partial list of fire due to mining: human-made structures to extract minerals, ores, rock, petroleum, natural gas, etc.
| Date | Location | Dead/injured | Details | References |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1884 to present | New Straitsville, Ohio | Coal mine fire ignited by striking miners | World's Greatest Mine Fire [2] | |
| May 31, 1892 | Příbram, now in the Czech Republic, | 319/? | Fire in Marine iron mine | |
| September 7, 1895 | Osceola Township, Houghton County, Michigan | 30/? | Osceola copper mine caught fire | [3] |
| April 7, 1911 | Colliery, Throop, Pennsylvania, | 72/? | Fire at the Prince-Pancoast, leaving 72 dead by suffocation | [4] |
| 1915 to present | Luzerne County, Pennsylvania | Laurel Run mine fire ignited when a carbide lamp set fire to a timber support | ||
| 1956 | Belgium | 262/? | Bois du Cazier fire killed 262 people from 12 nations | |
| 1962 | Algeria | Devil's Cigarette Lighter fire in a gas field, lasted almost 6 months before doused with explosives | ||
| 1962 to present | Pennsylvania | Centralia Mine Fire, rendering the town uninhabitable | ||
| 1967 to present | Kukruse, Estonia | A continuously burning gangue mound at the Kukruse mine | ||
| 1971 to present | Derweze, Ahal Province, Turkmenistan | Darvaza gas crater fire in a natural gas field | ||
| morning of May 2, 1972 | Kellogg, Idaho | 91/? | Fire broke out in the Sunshine Mine, on the morning of May 2; 91 workers died from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning | |
| September 16, 1986 | Kinross, Transvaal, South Africa | 177/235 | Kinross mining disaster fire in a gold mine owned by the General Mining Union Corporation | [5] |
| July 6, 1988 | North Sea | 167/? | Piper Alpha oil platform disaster | |
| 1991 | State of Kuwait | Kuwaiti oil fires following the Gulf War | ||
| 2010 | Gulf of Mexico | Explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon mobile offshore drilling unit | ||
| New Zealand | 29/? | Pike River Mine disaster in New Zealand; a series of three explosions in the mine was followed by a fourth which set fire to the coal. 29 miners and contractors perished. | ||
| December 4, 2015 | Caspian Sea | 12+18 missing /? | Gunashli Platform No.10 fire broke out on the offshore oil and gas platform in the Azerbaijani section of the Caspian Sea; 12 confirmed deaths, 18 missing. |
| Date | Location | Dead/injured | Details | References |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 8, 1871 | Michigan | >200/? | A series of fires across the state, the most severe of which was the Port Huron fire. The combined Michigan fires killed over 200 people and burned about 1.2 million acres. Occurred on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire and the Peshtigo Fire. | The Great Michigan Fire |
| October 8, 1871 | Wisconsin | 1,500-2,500/? | Deadliest wildfire in world history. Death toll can only be estimated because entire towns with all town records were incinerated. Burned over 1.2 million acres. Occurred on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire and the Great Michigan Fires. | Peshtigo Fire |
| 1910 | North Idaho and Western Montana | 87/? | The largest Fire in U.S. history burned an area the size of Connecticut (3,000,000 acres [12,000 km2]), killing 87 people, including 78 firefighters | Great Fire of 1910 [6] |
| 1911 | Ontario | 73-200/? | Great Porcupine Fire | |
| July 29, 1916 | 223/? | Six towns destroyed, two more damaged | Matheson Fire | |
| October 12, 1918 | Minnesota | 453/? | 1918 Cloquet Fire | |
| 1921 | 35/? | 1921 Mari wildfires | ||
| 1922 | Northern Ontario | Several towns destroyed including 90% of the city of Haileybury, Ontario | Great Fire of 1922 |
The 2008 California wildfire season was one of the most devastating in the state of the 21st century. While 6,255 fires occurred, about two-thirds as many as in 2007, the total area burned— 1,593,690 acres —far exceeded that of previous years.
Bushfires in Australia are a widespread and regular occurrence that have contributed significantly to shaping the nature of the continent over millions of years. Eastern Australia is one of the most fire-prone regions of the world, and its predominant eucalyptus forests have evolved to thrive on the phenomenon of bushfire. However, the fires can cause significant property damage and loss of both human and animal life. Bushfires have killed approximately 800 people in Australia since 1851, and billions of animals.
The 2009 California wildfires were a series of 9,159 wildfires that were active in the US state of California, during the year 2009. The fires burned more than 422,147 acres of land from early February through late November, due to Red Flag conditions, destroying hundreds of structures, injuring 134 people, and killing four. The wildfires also caused at least US$134.48 million in damage. Although the fires burned many different regions of California in August, the month was especially notable for several very large fires which burned in Southern California, despite being outside of the normal fire season for that region.
The bushfire season in the summer of 2014–15, was expected to have the potential for many fires in eastern Australia after lower than expected rainfall was received in many areas. Authorities released warnings in the early spring that the season could be particularly bad.
The 2015 California wildfire season was a series of wildfires that burned across the state of California. By the end of 2015 a total of 8,745 fires were recorded, burning 893,362 acres (3,615 km2) across the state. Approximately 3,159 structures were damaged or destroyed by wildfires, and at least 7 fatalities were recorded.
The Soberanes Fire was a large wildfire that burned from July to October 2016 in the Santa Lucia Mountains of Monterey County, California. It destroyed 57 homes and killed a bulldozer operator, and cost about $260 million to suppress, making it at the time the most expensive wildfire to fight in United States history. At the fire's peak, over 5,000 personnel were assigned to the blaze. The fire was the result of an illegal campfire in Garrapata State Park. By the time it was finally extinguished, the fire had burned 132,127 acres (53,470 ha) along the Big Sur coast in the Los Padres National Forest, Ventana Wilderness, and adjacent private and public land in Monterey County, ranking it 18th on the list of the largest California wildfires in terms of acreage burned.
A series of wildfires burned across Chile during January 2017.
The 2017 wildfire season involved wildfires on multiple continents. On Greenland, which is mostly covered by ice and permafrost, multiple fires occurred in melted peat bogs, described as "unusual, and possibly unprecedented". Popular media asked whether the wildfires were related to global warming. Research published by NASA states "climate change has increased fire risk in many regions", but caused "greater severity in the colder latitudes" where boreal and temperate forests exist, and scholars have described "a warm weather fluctuation that has become more frequent in recent decades" related to wildfires, without naming any particular event as being directly caused by global warming.
The 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive wildfire season in California history. It was also the largest on record at the time, now third after the 2020 and 2021 California wildfire seasons. In 2018, there were a total of 103 confirmed fatalities, 24,226 structures damaged or destroyed, and 8,527 fires burning 1,975,086 acres (799,289 ha), about 2% of the state's 100 million acres of land. Through the end of August 2018, Cal Fire alone spent $432 million on operations. The catastrophic Camp Fire alone killed at least 85 people, destroyed 18,804 buildings and caused $16.5 billion in property damage, while overall the fires resulted in at least $26.347 billion in property damage and firefighting costs, including $25.4 billion in property damage and $947 million in fire suppression costs.
The 2019–20 Australian bushfire season or Black Summer was one of the most intense and catastrophic fire seasons on record in Australia. It included a period of bushfires in many parts of Australia, which, due to its unusual intensity, size, duration, and uncontrollable dimension, was considered a megafire by media at the time. Exceptionally dry conditions, a lack of soil moisture, and early fires in Central Queensland led to an early start to the bushfire season, beginning in June 2019. Hundreds of fires burnt, mainly in the southeast of the country, until May 2020. The most severe fires peaked from December 2019 to January 2020.
On 23 January 2020, a fire was started in the Agrícola del Lago reed bed in Cagua, Aragua state, Venezuela. Eleven people were confirmed to have died as a result of the fire, all but two being minors.
A megafire is an exceptional fire that devastates a large area. They are characterised by their intensity, size, duration and uncontrollable scale. There is no precise scientific definition.
The August Complex was a massive wildfire that burned in the Coast Range of Northern California, in Glenn, Lake, Mendocino, Tehama, Trinity, and Shasta Counties. The complex originated as 38 separate fires started by lightning strikes on August 16–17, 2020. Four of the largest fires, the Doe, Tatham, Glade, and Hull fires, had burned together by August 30. On September 9, the Doe Fire, the main fire of the August Complex, surpassed the 2018 Mendocino Complex to become both the single-largest wildfire and the largest fire complex in recorded California history. On September 10, the combined Doe Fire also merged with the Elkhorn Fire and the Hopkins Fire, growing substantially in size. By the time it was extinguished on November 12, the August Complex fire had burned a total of 1,032,648 acres (417,898 ha), or 1,614 square miles (4,180 km2), about 1% of California's 100 million acres of land, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The Santiam Fire was a very large wildfire that burned in Marion, Jefferson, Linn, and Clackamas Counties, in northwest Oregon, United States. Having ignited in August 2020, the 402,274-acre (162,795 ha) fire ravaged multiple communities in northwestern Oregon, before it was fully contained on December 10, 2020. The fire started as three separate fires. The Beachie Creek, Lionshead, and P-515 fires were ignited by lightning on August 16, 2020. The first three fires gradually grew in size, before explosively spreading in early September during a heatwave, fanned by powerful east winds. Early on September 8, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead Fires merged, and the combined fire was labeled the Santiam Fire, before being returned to their original names a couple of days later. The P-515 Fire merged into the Lionshead Fire a few days later. The Santiam Fire destroyed over 1,500 structures, including nearly the entire cities of Detroit and Gates, with Idanha, Mill City, and Lyons suffering varying amounts of damage, becoming one of the most destructive wildfires in the recorded history of Oregon. The fire killed five people. On September 10–12, 2020, there were fears that the Santiam Fire would merge with the Riverside Fire to the north.
The Western United States experienced a series of major wildfires in 2020. Severe August thunderstorms ignited numerous wildfires across California, Oregon, and Washington, followed in early September by additional ignitions across the West Coast. Fanned by strong, gusty winds and fueled by hot, dry terrains, many of the fires exploded and coalesced into record-breaking megafires, burning more than 10.2 million acres of land, mobilizing tens of thousands of firefighters, razing over ten thousand buildings, and killing at least 37 people. The fires caused over $19.884 billion in damages, including $16.5 billion in property damage and $3.384 billion in fire suppression costs. Climate change and poor forest management practices contributed to the severity of the wildfires.
The Slater and Devil fires were two fires that burned in Northern California and Southern Oregon during the 2020 California wildfire season. The fires burned 166,127 acres (67,229 ha), claimed two lives, injured 12 people, and were 100% contained on November 16. The fires caused some highway reconstructions and forest closures.
The 1999 Jones Fire was a destructive wildfire in the U.S. state of California's Shasta County. The fire ignited on October 16, and was contained on October 19, 1999. It burned 26,200 acres (10,600 ha), destroyed 954 structures, and resulted in one fatality, becoming the then-second most destructive wildfire ever recorded in California, behind only the Oakland firestorm of 1991. As of 2023 it remains one of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the history of the state. The cause of the fire was never determined.
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