About the data

firebancanada reads fire ban orders published by Canadian public authorities and reports them without interpretation. This page explains where the numbers come from and, more importantly, where they stop.

Every status carries its source

A status on this site is never our opinion. It is a reading of a specific order from a specific authority at a specific time, and all three travel with it: the issuing body, a link to the original, and the timestamp of our last successful read. If you need to act on it, follow the link — the authority's own order governs, always.

What happens when a source goes quiet

Sources go down. When ours does, the honest answer is to say so rather than keep showing yesterday's reading as though it were today's. Two independent guards enforce that. A failed read is stamped onto the record at the moment it fails. And regardless of whether anything failed, a reading older than 36 hours falls back to Unconfirmed on its own — which covers the case where our nightly job did not run at all and therefore never recorded an error.

Coverage before completeness

Some authorities publish a clean daily feed. Others publish a PDF, a map image, or nothing machine-readable at all. Where we cannot read a source reliably, the area is marked unconfirmed and points at the authority instead. Fewer areas reported accurately is worth more than many reported stale.

Fire danger is not a fire ban

Fire danger ratings and fire weather indices describe conditions. A fire ban is a legal restriction. They often move together and they are not the same thing — wherever both appear on this site, they are labelled separately and never merged into one signal.

Status of this site

We currently report 5 of 13 provinces and territories, covering 46 areas. The rest are missing for one of two reasons, and the coverage page names which applies to each: either the source cannot be read by a machine, or it can be read but is licensed for non-commercial use only and we are waiting on written permission.

A unit goes live only once its source is verified and its terms allow the use. That is why the list grows slowly, and why a province you expected to find may not be here yet.