I found out about a wildfire near my home from my friends.

How can you not know there's a wildfire near your home?

I live in rural North Wales, surrounded by forests, moorland and mountains.

It is a beautiful place to live and run a business, but in prolonged dry weather that landscape can change very quickly.

A column of smoke on the horizon matters here.

So does the smell of burning through an open window. A helicopter circling the valley. A fire engine heading up a forestry road.

And if you're away from home, you may not see any of those things at all.

That March fire made the problem painfully obvious.

The information was out there somewhere.

But there was no simple way for me to know:

There is a wildfire near your home. You should probably pay attention to this.

The information exists. The problem is finding it.

Britain has extraordinary technology watching the planet.

Satellites pass overhead detecting heat from space. Fire and rescue services publish incident information. Government agencies issue warnings. Local newsrooms report major fires. Communities share photographs, smoke sightings and road closures.

But those pieces of information are scattered across dozens — sometimes hundreds — of different places.

Some fire services publish detailed live incident logs. Others publish occasional updates. Some information appears on Facebook or X. Some reaches local newspapers. Some incidents can be visible from miles away before there is anything obvious to find online.

And sometimes the first indication that something serious is happening is simply somebody nearby saying:

“Have you seen the fire?”

That isn't good enough.

So I started building something better.

Wildfire Watch is an attempt to bring those fragments together.

Satellite-detected hotspots. Fire service information. Weather conditions. Local reports. Location.

One place designed to answer a very human question:

What is happening around me right now?

And, crucially:

What is happening around the places I care about when I'm not there?

That could be your home.

Your farm.

Your business.

Your campsite.

Your family.

Your animals.

Your land.

Wildfire Watch is being built so that a serious fire developing nearby is harder to miss.

It isn't about replacing emergency services.

Wildfire Watch is not a substitute for the fire service, emergency alerts or official public safety information.

It is about making the information that already exists easier to find, easier to understand and much more useful.

Because most people don't spend their day checking fire-service websites, satellite feeds, local news outlets, social media channels and weather data.

Nor should they have to.

If something significant is developing near a place that matters to you, technology ought to be able to help bring that information to your attention.

Wildfire isn't somebody else's problem anymore.

For many of us in Britain, wildfire still sounds like something that happens in California, Australia, Greece or southern Spain.

But our landscape burns too.

Moorland burns. Grassland burns. Forestry burns. Crops burn. Heathland burns.

And the consequences can be enormous: damage to wildlife and habitats, farms and forestry, roads and infrastructure, homes and businesses — as well as the very real danger faced by firefighters and communities caught in their path.

A changing climate doesn't mean that every hot day ends in catastrophe.

It does mean that understanding fire risk — and getting reliable information quickly when something does happen — is becoming increasingly important.

Behind every dot on the map is a real place.

That's easy to forget.

A hotspot isn't just a latitude and longitude.

It might be someone's farm.

A forestry worker's workplace.

A hill somebody is walking with their children.

A campsite full of families.

A nature reserve.

A village.

A home.

Or, as it was for me, the place where your animals, your business and much of your life are sitting while you're miles away and completely unaware that a wildfire is burning nearby.

Wildfire Watch is being built around that reality.

The technology matters.

But the people underneath the data matter more.

And sometimes the first person to know is already there.

One of the most important lessons behind Wildfire Watch is that no single source will ever see everything first.

Sometimes a satellite detects a fire.

Sometimes the fire service reports it.

Sometimes a journalist finds it.

And sometimes it's a farmer, walker, cyclist, neighbour or resident who looks across a valley and thinks:

That's not a bonfire.

The long-term ambition for Wildfire Watch is therefore bigger than simply putting official feeds onto a map.

It's to create a trusted, intelligent picture of wildfire activity by bringing together technology, public information and people on the ground — while being very clear about what is confirmed, what is detected and what is still unverified.

Because speed matters.

But so does trust.

This is only the beginning.

Wildfire Watch started with one fire in North Wales and one uncomfortable realisation:

If my friends hadn't messaged me, how long would it have taken before I knew?

But the problem is much bigger than one incident.

Wildfire information across the UK is fragmented.

So the goal is simple:

Make wildfire information easier to see.
Make emerging incidents harder to miss.
Give people earlier awareness of what may be happening around the places they care about.

Wildfire Watch is still growing.

New information sources will be added. Detection will improve. Alerts will become smarter. And the system will get better at distinguishing between a genuinely important fire and the thousands of harmless heat sources and reports that create noise.

But the principle at its heart won't change.

Nobody should discover there's a serious wildfire near their home because a friend happens to send them a message.

There should be a better way to know.

That's why Wildfire Watch exists.