Wildfire Maps & Histories

The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California killed 85 people, making it the deadliest US wildfire since the 1918 Cloquet fire in Minnesota. The 2023 Lahaina fire on Maui killed 102 people, making it the deadliest US wildfire since the Camp Fire — and the deadliest fire of any kind in Hawaii's history.

A "megafire" is informally defined as a wildfire that burns more than 100,000 acres in a single event. A "gigafire" exceeds one million acres. The first conifer-forest gigafire in modern US history was the August Complex (2020) in northern California, which burned 1,032,648 acres.

In modern California — the most-studied wildfire region — the largest single fire is the 2020 August Complex at 1,032,648 acres. Older fires in Alaska, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Plains exceeded that area in raw scale (the 1910 Great Fire in Idaho/Montana burned approximately 3 million acres), but pre-modern records are difficult to compare directly because of variable mapping standards.

By dollar damage, the 2018 Camp Fire is the costliest US wildfire on record at approximately $16.5 billion in 2018 dollars (about $20.8 billion adjusted to 2024). By structures destroyed, the Camp Fire is also the most destructive, with 18,804 buildings burned. The 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado destroyed 1,084 structures over just two days, the highest density of destruction per acre.