Evacuation information
Local and provincial or territorial orders are authoritative. Information must remain accessible, current and available when connectivity fails.
Fire · smoke · community
Active wildfire and smoke emergency
Fire is local. Smoke crosses a continent.
Wildfires are displacing Canadian communities while smoke changes the air far beyond the fireline. This page puts official evacuation, fire and health systems first—and frames safer open-source contributions around them.
Dated evidence
What is known
These figures preserve the date and source of the reviewed report. Use the official systems below for changing conditions.
- 582
- Active fires reported
- 4.1M ha
- Burned during 2026
- >10,000
- People under evacuation orders
The federal August update counted 31 fires as out of control. This is a dated snapshot, not a live total.
Public Safety Canada — August 2026 update ↗Public Safety Canada reported 4,793 fires nationally by August 18.
Public Safety Canada — August 2026 update ↗The federal update described continuing displacement amid severe activity in southern British Columbia.
Public Safety Canada — August 2026 update ↗Operational information
Check the source before you act.
Conditions and orders can change faster than this reviewed page. These links lead to the responsible public systems.
Canadian Wildland Fire Information System National fire-weather, behaviour and mapping products.Canada wildfire response hub Provincial and territorial links, fire maps and federal response information.Air Quality Health Index Current local air-quality health conditions and forecasts.Canada smoke forecast maps Environment and Climate Change Canada smoke forecasts.
Human priorities
Start with the people closest to the problem.
Clean indoor air
Smoke can travel thousands of kilometres. Children, older adults, pregnant people and people with health conditions can face greater risk.
Remote and First Nations communities
Support must follow community leadership and jurisdiction. Do not scrape, infer or publish sensitive community-level movement data.
Bounded open-source work
Build around accountable response—not around vulnerable people.
Offline evacuation access
Prototype cached, multilingual and low-bandwidth access to official orders without creating a competing alert channel.
Smoke-risk translation
Turn AQHI and official health guidance into accessible formats while preserving source, location and update time.
Infrastructure exposure
Use public data to flag potential exposure of roads, power and communications for expert review—not operational routing.
Accountable fire mapping
Document model provenance, latency and uncertainty. Never represent satellite or AI outputs as a substitute for incident command.
Source ledger
Evidence, with its limits visible.
Public Safety Canada — August 2026 update ↗Dated national activity, displacement and outlook snapshot.Public Safety Canada — responding in 2026 ↗Emergency-management, preparedness and smoke context.Health Canada — wildfire smoke ↗Health effects, AQHI guidance and current-condition links.Natural Resources Canada — CWFIS ↗Authoritative national wildfire information system.