Wildfire alerts per location, automatic and by e-mail

FireWatch Locations monitors a configurable radius around every campsite, holiday park, estate or installation your organisation operates, day and night. When satellites detect fire inside that radius, your teams automatically receive an alert e-mail: which site, how far, in which direction and how large.

FireWatch map showing active wildfires across France and northern Spain — The live map: every dot is a current fire event; colour and size show intensity and extent.

The problem

Your guests sleep in the forest. That is the product, and the risk.

Outdoor hospitality sells nature: campsites among the pines, lodges on a lake, grounds in the hills. That same setting makes organisations with dozens of outdoor locations structurally exposed to wildfire. Recent summers have shown this is no longer an incident but a seasonal pattern, from Portugal to the Peloponnese and from the Gironde to the Dutch borderlands.

During an incident the operational problem is rarely the fire itself, but information. Where exactly is it? Is it moving towards us? Official channels lag, news reports are vague about locations, and head office sometimes hears it later than the guests do.

“In July 2026 I was camping with my family near Carcans when we had to evacuate from what became France's largest wildfire in fifty years. Reliable information about where the fire actually was proved impossible to find. FireWatch was built to close that gap.” Rutger Harder, creator of FireWatch

Satellite image with a smoke plume over the Gironde and active fire detections, July 2026 — The same fire, live: the smoke plume over the Gironde drifts inland while detections spread along the coast. This is the picture that was missing during the evacuation.

How it works

FireWatch places an alert radius around every location, for instance 30 kilometres. Five satellite sources measure heat radiation at the surface: VIIRS on Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21, MODIS, and the geostationary Meteosat that refreshes large fires every fifteen minutes. Individual detections are clustered into fire events with extent, intensity and a timeline.

Alerting is computed per site using the edge distance of the fire, not its centre: a thousand-hectare fire whose edge touches your radius counts as inside it. New fires typically appear in the system within half an hour to three and a half hours of the satellite overpass.

Measured heat footprints per fire near Bordeaux on the FireWatch map — Each patch is a measured footprint: the area where satellites registered heat. So you see where the fire is, not just that something is burning somewhere.

What you get

E-mail alerting: Within one cycle of satellite data arriving, with re-alerts on clear growth or approach. Unlimited recipients.
Daily digest: One e-mail per day with the situation around all your sites, at a time you choose.
Dashboard: Top sites at risk, sortable distance table, distance history per site and the full alert log.
Dedicated map view: A shareable live map with your locations, your logo and live alert status per site. Suitable as a wall display at a reception.
Noise control: Configurable thresholds, per-alert muting and multi-layer filtering of industrial heat sources.
Seven languages: Alerts and dashboard in Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian or Greek, configurable per client.

FireWatch with aerial imagery and the detail panel of a fire near Salaunes — For each fire you see extent, intensity, activity per six hours and the wind on site, on aerial imagery if you wish. This is the fire near Salaunes that forced the creator to leave his campsite in July 2026.

Who it is for

Any organisation with assets, installations or people spread across sites outside the built-up area. Wildfire is not only a recreation problem: smoke and heat along a railway line or transmission corridor halt traffic and supply, a fire near a mast site can take down coverage for an entire region, and a site that has to be evacuated costs a day of revenue. Knowing earlier that something is burning nearby means you can divert, scale down or evacuate on your own terms instead of under pressure.

Campsites and holiday parksGuests sleep outdoors and evacuation takes time. Knowing early means acting calmly instead of improvising.

Solar and wind farmsUnmanned sites in dry grass and heathland, often hard to reach and rarely visited.

Utilities and grid operatorsSubstations and transmission corridors through forest and heath, where fire and smoke force shutdowns.

Telecom and radio networksSites on hilltops and in woodland, where an outage immediately affects a whole region's connectivity.

Forestry and nature managementMonitoring your own estates, coordinating suppression and reconstructing afterwards what burned when.

InsurersVisibility of portfolio exposure during a fire season, per location and per day.

Government and safety regionsA situational picture across the border, where national systems stop.

Ports and industrial estatesTank farms, storage and open yards where a nearby fire quickly becomes your own problem.

Rail and road authoritiesFire along the track halts traffic; earlier warning creates room to divert.

Data centresSmoke and heat at the air intake and risk to the power supply, even from a fire kilometres away.

Logistics and distributionRemote sites with outdoor storage, often without permanent staffing.

Water companiesExtraction sites and installations in dune, forest and heathland, exactly where fires start.

Honestly: what satellites cannot do

We do not sell false certainty. Polar satellites pass a few times a day; between two overpasses only Meteosat is watching, and it only sees large fires. Heavy cloud or thick smoke can block the view, and a very small or very brief fire can stay below the detection threshold.

FireWatch is therefore a powerful additional safety net and an information advantage, not a replacement for official alerting, local observation or your own safety protocols. That same honesty is printed on our public map and in the explanation.

What it costs

A fixed amount per location per month, on a tier that decreases as you monitor more locations. Everything is included: alerting, daily digest, dashboard, map view, maintenance and support. No setup fees, cancel monthly. A quotation follows based on the number of locations and the alert channels you need.

First month free pilot

Full functionality, all your locations, no commitments. You supply a list of locations (name plus coordinate or address) and we configure the dashboard, alerting and map view the same day.

Request a pilot via hallo@1338.nl

Frequently asked questions

How quickly do I get notified after a fire breaks out?

As soon as a satellite has seen the fire and the data has been processed: usually half an hour to three and a half hours after the overpass. A fire that has just started between two overpasses may still be invisible. Large fires are then refreshed every fifteen minutes via Meteosat.

How many false alarms will I get?

Multiple filter layers remove recurring industrial heat sources automatically, usually within a few days and retroactively. On top of that you set a threshold per organisation (for instance only alert from three detections, or from a certain number of hectares) and you can mute an individual alert.

Does this work outside Europe?

Current coverage is Europe and the Mediterranean. The underlying satellite data is global; other regions are possible on request.

How is our location data handled?

We process only what is needed: site name, coordinate, alert radius and the e-mail addresses of your recipients. The system runs on our own infrastructure in the Netherlands. The shareable map link is read-only and can be rotated at any moment, which invalidates the old link immediately.

Can we integrate it with our own systems?

Besides e-mail, additional alert channels such as SMS, webhooks or integration with your own systems are available on request, as is API access to the raw alert and distance data.

Is FireWatch an official alerting system?

No. FireWatch is an information tool. In case of threat always follow official channels such as 112, NL-Alert or FR-Alert and the instructions of emergency services.

About 1338

FireWatch is a service by 1338, Rutger Harder's consultancy for automation, integrations, custom software and security. FireWatch was created after an evacuation from a campsite near Carcans in July 2026 and has since been developed into a system that refreshes all of Europe every fifteen minutes.