What are the largest wildfires in American history?

Fueled by dry grass, high winds and unseasonably warm temperatures, the Smokehouse Creek fire in the Texas Panhandle has now burned more than 1.1 million acres, making it the largest fire in the state’s history.

With more than a million acres burned, it is also one of the largest wildfires recorded in the United States.

Nearly all of the largest wildfires in U.S. history, including the Texas fire, are in fact not one fire with a single ignition point, but a combination of fires burning close together. They are so-called fire complexes and are attacked by firefighters under a unified command.

Here’s a look back at five of the largest wildfires ever recorded in the United States.

2020 — Northern California

August complex fire

The largest wildfire in California’s recorded history was a convergence of nearly 40 fires, most of which were sparked by lightning strikes in August in Mendocino County, a rural area about 90 miles north of San Francisco. It burned through 1,032,648 acres and caused the death of one firefighter. Overall, 2020 was a brutal year of wildfires in California, with the state experiencing about 10,000 separate fires. That year’s wildfire season burned 4.3 million hectares and killed 33 people. according to scientists.

2004 – ALASKA

Taylor complex fire

Lightning strikes also caused this group of fires in August, during a period of dry weather. It consumed approximately 1.3 million hectares in a sparsely populated area eastern Alaska near the border with Canada. It was part of a record fire season in Alaska, with more than 6.5 million hectares burned. No deaths were reported.

Just a side note before we look further back into the past.

Fire area counts from the past four decades are significantly more accurate than those from the era before the use of satellite measurements, scientists say. Now satellites, planes and drones are being used to measure the fire zone, verifying that data on the ground, said Virginia Iglesias, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and interim director of the Earth Lab.

“We are very certain of what happened in the satellite era, and very certain of what happened in the historical era,” she said. “The degree of certainty decreases as we go further back in time.”

1910—Northwest USA

The Great Fire of 1910

According to historical reports, nearly three million acres were burned in just two days – August 20 and 21 – in Idaho, Montana and Washington during a drought-stricken summer. Hurricane winds helped wipe out small towns and kill more than 85 people. It also led to a strengthening of the US Forest Service, which was only five years old at the time.

1871—Michigan

The Great Michigan Fire

An extremely dry summer, followed by unusually warm weather in the fall, led to a conflagration in Michigan, which is believed to have destroyed approximately 2.5 million acres between October 8 and 10, 1871. It damaged much of the Lake Michigan shoreline and leveled the towns of Holland and Manistee. On the same day the Great Fire started in Chicago and the Peshtigo Fire broke out in Wisconsin.

1871—Wisconsin

The Peshtigo Fire

The intensely dry conditions quickly caused a fire devoured Peshtigo, a community of about 2,000 people in northeastern Wisconsin. Fires were common in the region due to logging and land clearing for agriculture and other industries, historians say.

But the Peshtigo fire would scorch as much as 1.2 million to 1.5 million hectares and kill about 1,500 people, including up to 1.2 million hectares. 800 people in Pestigo. These estimates from the Wisconsin Historical Society also make it one of the deadliest fires in American history.