California Wildfires Map Reveals Ten Most Destructive Wildfires

Peak wildfire season in California has historically lasted from summer to October. But as the Eaton and Palisades fires in January 2025 showed, wildfires can strike at any time. New research suggests the fire season in the Golden State is lengthening, with wildfires starting earlier each year. Unfortunately, they’re also becoming more disastrous.

This animated map revisits the top 10 most destructive wildfires in California history. It relies on data from CAL FIRE that ranks fires based on the number of structures they’ve destroyed.

For each fire, the map shows colorized real-world imagery of the surrounding area before zooming in to the fire’s location. The map darkens as fires bloom from their ignition points to their final perimeters. The map lists details including date, acreage burned, structures destroyed, and more. As the map rotates around each fire, you can see city and town boundaries. Coupled with terrain, these elements provide visual context into the impacts of the fires and how they spread. An inset map shows the location of each wildfire relative to California as a whole.

At the end of the video, a summary slide lists the top 10 fires alongside a map, so you can see where they’re distributed across the state.

The video shows that the most destructive fires do not cluster in a specific region of the state. They’ve blazed through Northern, Central, and Southern California, on the coast and inland. Many occurred in mountainous areas where fires can spread due to terrain and availability of fuel and are also more challenging to fight.

Perhaps most concerning is the recency of the fires. In California’s history, seven of the most destructive fires occurred since 2015. Among those, three occurred in the last five years. The same conditions that have extended fire seasons are also driving more destructive wildfires.