US Wildfires smart home integration, free and open source
Active wildfires near your home in the United States, from NIFC: distance, size, containment.
Published by guim31
- Devices
- Version 1.0.0
- Requires Gladys >=5.3.0
- ★ 0
Follow the active wildfires around your home in the United States from Gladys, with the official data of the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC): the incidents and the mapped fire perimeters of WFIGS (Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services), public domain, updated every few minutes. No account, no API key.
For each fire within your radius: its name, its distance (to the edge of its mapped perimeter when there is one), its size, its containment, its county and state.
This is not an official alert service: in an emergency, follow your local authorities, your county emergency alerts and the evacuation orders. Not affiliated with NIFC, the US Forest Service or any other agency.
What you get
- A Fires around the house device: number of fires in the radius, distance of the nearest fire, the nearest fire in words, and the total burned area, with their history.
- A dashboard widget listing the fires nearest first, with their size and containment.
- Three scene triggers: a new fire in the radius, a fire approaching (within the alert distance), a fire 100 % contained.
- A scene action that reads the fires around as one sentence, to send by message or have it read aloud.
Requirements
- Gladys Assistant 5.3 or later.
- Internet access from the Gladys host (the integration reads
services3.arcgis.com, the ArcGIS service of NIFC). - A location for your house in Gladys (Settings → Houses), or coordinates typed in the configuration. The data covers the United States (and Puerto Rico) only.
Configuration
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Centre latitude and longitude | Centre of the area. Leave both empty to use the location of your house in Gladys. Decimal comma accepted. |
| Radius | 10, 25, 50 (by default), 100 or 150 miles. |
| Alert distance | 1 to 25 miles (10 by default): the "Fire approaching" trigger fires when a fire comes this close. |
| Include prescribed burns | Also follow the planned burns lit by land managers ("RX"). Off by default. |
| Ignore fully contained fires | Hide the fires at 100 % containment, which stay listed until declared out. Off by default. |
| Units | Miles and acres (by default), or kilometres and hectares. |
| Refresh interval | 10, 15 (by default), 30 or 60 minutes. |
| Language of the texts | Names of the features (at their creation) and texts sent to the scenes. French by default. |
Save, then open the Discover tab of the integration and create the Fires around the house device. The Show the current fires button of the configuration lists the fires around right away: a quick way to check the settings.
The followed fires
A fire is followed when NIFC lists it as current, it is a wildfire (or a prescribed burn, if chosen), and its distance is within the radius. The distance is measured to the edge of its mapped perimeter when NIFC has one (0 when your house is inside it), else to its point of origin. Large fires are often much closer by their perimeter than by their point: the Hagen fire of the test recording is 25 miles away by its point and 21 by its perimeter.
Privacy: the location sent to NIFC is rounded to 0.1° (about 7 miles), with a radius widened
accordingly; the exact distance is computed in the container. The location of the house is never written
to the logs nor to /data.
Device
| Feature | Type | Value |
|---|---|---|
| Fires in the radius | Counter | Number of followed fires |
| Nearest fire distance | Distance (mi, km) | Distance to the nearest fire; 1,000 when there is none, so a "below 10" condition holds |
| Nearest fire | Text | e.g. North Cayuse · 15 mi · 4,887 acres · 97% contained · Umatilla, OR |
| Total burned area | Area (km²) | Area of the followed fires. Gladys has no acre unit: 1 km² is 247 acres |
The unit of the distance is the one of the Units setting when the device is created; it then stays the same (delete and create the device again to change it). When NIFC does not answer, nothing is published: the last values stay, and the configuration screen says it. The values are read in the container every refresh interval: the device is not polled by Gladys.
Dashboard widget
Wildfires around: a heading with the number of fires, then up to 8 fires, nearest first. Each row shows the name, the distance, the size and the county, and the containment as a badge (green at 100 %). Tap a row to see the discovery date, the cause, the NIFC identifier and a map of the fire's location. The distances follow the units of your Gladys account. The footer gives the source and the time of the last reading; the InciWeb button (incident news) can be hidden in the settings of the widget.
Scene triggers
US wildfires: new fire in the radius fires when a fire not seen before enters the radius. Filter: incident types (wildfire, prescribed burn).
US wildfires: fire approaching fires when a fire comes within the alert distance of the configuration, a new fire included. Filter: incident types.
US wildfires: fire 100 % contained fires when a followed fire reaches 100 % containment.
Each trigger fires once per fire: a perimeter redrawn back and forth across the alert distance does not
fire again. The fires already listed when the integration starts for the first time, or when you change
its configuration, fire nothing: they are not news. What was seen is kept under /data: a restart fires
nothing for the fires already seen. At most 20 events fire per refresh.
Variables of the three triggers: name, incident_type (wildfire, prescribed), distance and
distance_unit (mi or km), area and area_unit (acres or ha), containment (percent, empty
when NIFC does not say), state (CA, OR…), county, cause (Human, Natural, Undetermined, as
published) and summary (one line, like the Nearest fire feature).
Scene action
US wildfires: read the fires around reads NIFC again if the last reading is older than the refresh interval, then returns:
text: the fires in one sentence, e.g.5 fires within 50 mi: North Cayuse, 15 mi; Hagen, 21 mi; Dorran Road, 22 mi; 1924, 35 mi; Paradise, 41 mi.(5 fires at most, then "and N more");count: the number of fires.
Scene examples
- Message when a fire comes close: trigger "US wildfires: fire approaching", action "Send a message"
with
{{triggerEvent.data.summary}}. - Morning briefing in fire season: every day at 7:30, "US wildfires: read the fires around", then
"Send a message" with its
text, only ifcountis above 0. - Close the windows and stop the ventilation: when "Nearest fire distance" goes below 10, turn off the heat recovery ventilator and send a reminder to close the windows (smoke).
- Good news: on "US wildfires: fire 100 % contained", send
{{triggerEvent.data.name}} is contained.
Data sources, terms and quotas
- Data: NIFC, WFIGS layers "Incident Locations Current" and "Interagency Perimeters Current", public domain, read from NIFC open data without an account. The incidents come from IRWIN, the shared system of the federal, state and local fire agencies.
- The data is entered by the agencies, sometimes late: a new fire may appear after a delay, the size and containment are those last reported, small fires often have no perimeter, and a fire stays "current" until it is declared out. It never replaces the alerts and evacuation orders of your local authorities. See Ready.gov to prepare.
- Quotas: NIFC publishes none for these public layers. The integration asks twice per refresh interval (15 minutes by default), only for the area around your house, with simplified perimeters (about 200 m precision): a few tens of kilobytes per cycle.
Troubleshooting
- "No centre" in the configuration: give your house a location in Gladys (Settings → Houses), or type coordinates.
- "NIFC does not answer": the ArcGIS service is down or unreachable from the Gladys host. The last values stay; the integration tries again at every refresh and says so in its logs once.
- No fire at all: check that the centre is in the United States, and widen the radius; outside the fire season, there may simply be none.
- Many small fires I do not care about: turn on "Ignore fully contained fires", and keep the prescribed burns off.
- No trigger after a change of settings: expected, the fires already there are not news.
- The names of the features are in the wrong language, or the distance in the wrong unit: they are set when the device is created. Change the setting, delete the device, then create it again from the Discover tab.
- Logs: the integration page of Gladys, Logs tab. Set
LOG_LEVEL=debugfor a line per reading.
Limits
- United States and Puerto Rico only: WFIGS does not cover Canada or Mexico.
- The distance is measured to the mapped perimeter, which may be a day old or more; between two mappings, a fast fire can be closer than shown. Small fires have only a point.
- The size, containment and cause are the ones the agencies report: they can lag behind the field.
- NIFC does not publish the InciWeb page of an incident: the widget links to the InciWeb home page.
- Tested against the real NIFC service (recording of 7 November 2026 around Pendleton, Oregon), not on a real fire near a Gladys house: feedback is welcome on the forum.
Configuration settings
These are the settings US Wildfires asks for in its configuration screen in Gladys.
| Setting | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your area | section | No | The wildfires of the National Interagency Fire Center within a radius of your house (or of coordinates). Save, then create the device in the Discover tab. |
| Sources and limits | section | No | Data: NIFC WFIGS, public domain, read without an account. Not an official alert service: follow your local authorities and emergency alerts. Not affiliated with NIFC. |
| Centre latitude | string | No | Leave both coordinates empty to use the location of your house in Gladys. |
| Centre longitude | string | No | Decimal degrees, negative in the United States (west). |
| Radius | select | No | Fires whose perimeter (or location, when no perimeter is mapped) is within this distance. |
| Alert distance | select | No | The scene trigger “Fire approaching” fires when a fire comes within this distance. |
| Include prescribed burns | boolean | No | Planned burns lit by land managers (“RX”). More than half of the incidents in autumn. |
| Ignore fully contained fires | boolean | No | A fire stays listed for weeks after reaching 100 % containment, until it is declared out. |
| Units | select | No | Of the texts and of the distance feature (fixed when the device is created). The area feature is in km². |
| Refresh interval | select | No | NIFC updates the incidents every few minutes; the perimeters when they are mapped again. |
| Language of the texts | select | No | Names of the features (at their creation) and texts sent to the scenes. |
How to install US Wildfires in Gladys
- In Gladys, open Integrations: US Wildfires appears in the catalog, next to the native integrations, with a community badge.
- Click Install. Gladys pulls the Docker image (
ghcr.io/guim31/gladys-wildfires-us:1.0.0), starts it in a sandbox isolated from the core, and generates the integration's interface (devices, discovery and configuration). - Open the Configuration screen of the integration, fill in the settings, and save.
- You can also install it directly from its repository URL: https://github.com/guim31/gladys-wildfires-us.
US Wildfires requires Gladys >=5.3.0. The catalog inside Gladys refreshes every hour, so a new version becomes available at most one hour after its release.
Not running Gladys yet? It is free and open source: follow the installation guide to get started.
About external integrations
US Wildfires is an external integration: a community integration packaged as a Docker container and published on GitHub, that Gladys installs in one click and runs in a sandbox isolated from its core. It is published and maintained by guim31, not by the Gladys core team.
- Browse all integrations, native and community
- Build and publish your own external integration
- Source code on GitHub — source of this documentation