How Watch works — and what it cannot see

What Watch reads

• The federal wildfire incident feed — the National Interagency Fire Center’s WFIGS incident list, the same interagency record federal and state fire agencies publish to. Read every 15 minutes. Every incident the feed lists gets a reported point of origin and, usually, a reported size.
• Mapped perimeters from the WFIGS perimeter service, drawn by incident GIS teams (usually from an infrared flight, typically the morning after). About 1 in 13 incidents overall gets a perimeter, nearly all of the ones over 1,000 acres. When a perimeter exists, distance is measured to its nearest edge; otherwise to the reported point.
• NASA FIRMS satellite heat detections, hourly, 1–2 hours behind the satellite pass. Used only as confirmation for incidents the feed already lists — Watch does not invent fires from satellite pixels.

That is the whole list. No social media, no scanner feeds, no local news.

What it cannot see

• A fire nobody has reported to that feed yet. The feed is authoritative but not instant: an incident can burn for a while before it is entered, and small fires that are put out on initial attack may never appear.
• Structure fires, vehicle fires, controlled burns that are not wildland incidents.
• The fire’s real edge right now. A perimeter is a snapshot from when it was drawn; a reported point is where the incident started. Watch tells you which of the two it measured to, every time.
• Evacuation orders. Those come from your county sheriff or emergency management. Watch is an awareness tool and says so on every email.

How a place gets its status

Each place you load is compared with every listed fire by size and measured distance together, not distance alone. A small point report four miles away is worth watching, not a red banner; a ten-thousand-acre fire is a threat from much further. A place’s status is the highest across all fires, so a small fire close by cannot hide a large one a little further out. Status words are threat, watch, and none listed (“none listed” means exactly that: no listed wildfire inside watch distance — not “safe”).

Reported acres from the feed; a mapped perimeter with no acreage counts as at least 100 acres (a GIS team only maps incidents of consequence). Paid accounts can scale every distance by a personal setting: calm ×0.6, standard ×1, cautious ×1.6. Every status comes with a one-line reason in the app and in the email — the fire’s name, its reported size, the measured distance, and the rule it was compared with.

What you get, and when

• Status-change emails when a place moves to watch or threat, or back down from threat — checked every 15 minutes, sent the same tick. A place you add that is already inside a watch or threat distance is told so at the next check.
• New-fire emails when the feed lists a new incident inside a distance you choose (default 25 miles; 10+ acres by default, so point reports do not flood you).
• Text messages on Pro and Portfolio for the same events (how SMS works).
• The app shows every place with its status, the fire driving it, the measured distance, and when it was last checked; a map with the listed fires and any mapped perimeters; and a log of every alert sent.

No daily “all clear” email exists — silence means nothing changed, and the app shows the time of the last check so silence is never ambiguous.

What gets logged

• Every read of the feed is archived. Each 15-minute check stores what the feed reported per incident (name, status, size, position), and every distinct mapped perimeter is captured with its GIS timestamp and a fingerprint of the stored shape.
• Every alert is logged with the fire’s name, its reported size, the measured distance, the rule applied, the channel, and the time it was dispatched — the message text is kept exactly as sent. Texts are logged the same way. The log exports as CSV.
• Pro and Portfolio accounts can print the record per fire: an incident timeline report — first listing in the feed, every archived check that saw the incident, perimeter captures, and every notification to the account — with a document id, a generated-at stamp, and this cadence and these limits printed on it.

The record asserts our system’s actions only: what it saw in the feed, and when it notified you. It is not a statement about the fire itself, conditions on the ground, or the completeness of any feed — a fire the feed never listed leaves no record here.

If you got a demo link from us

We sometimes build a Watch account ahead of time for a business we would like to show it to: your office address and your town, or a clearly labelled sample list of public addresses, loaded into a real account on a temporary paid plan. The link signs you in; nothing is charged, nothing is emailed until you open it, and the account drops to the free tier when the demo period ends. You can delete the places, add your own, or ignore the whole thing. One reply stops any further mail from us, and unsubscribe links are on every email.

Who we are

FireRiskHere started with one question: is there a fire near me, right now? The first version did exactly that — open the page, and it showed active fires around your location. No search, no signup, just an instant answer.

That still works. But people who manage many properties needed the same answer for every address they’re responsible for, without checking each one — so we built Watch on top of the same live data.

FireRiskHere is run by Buy More UÜ, a small company in Estonia — the same name you’ll see on your receipt and in the terms. How the data works is on the methodology page.

Addresses you add are used only to measure distances to fires — never sold or shared (privacy).

Questions? support@fireriskhere.com