COD: Fire - 09-2026 - Series of fires in Bukavu in the province of South Kivu in the DRC was recorded by Global Incident Tracker on Thursday, 10 September 2026 at 00:00 UTC. The event is classified as a fire incident with a severity rating of Severe, and was detected through IFRC.
Recorded by the IFRC (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) as an emergency a national society responded to. Unlike a warning or a news report, this means a humanitarian response was actually mounted.
Where this happened
The incident is located in DR Congo (Africa), whose capital is Kinshasa. Historically, DR Congo is most affected by volcanic eruptions, floods, epidemics and conflict. You can follow every incident recorded in this country, updated live, on the DR Congo incident tracker.
Approximate coordinates of the reported event are -4.000°, 21.800°. The marker on the map above shows this position; for news-derived reports the location reflects the place named in media coverage and may represent a district or city rather than an exact site.
Understanding fire events
Structural, factory, market, hospital and residential fires. Most fire deaths are caused by smoke inhalation rather than flames, and a room can reach untenable conditions within a few minutes of ignition. Working smoke alarms and clear, unlocked exits remain the two measures that save the most lives.
How severity is rated
Global Incident Tracker rates every event on a four-step scale — Minor, Moderate, Severe and Extreme — derived from the source signal: earthquake magnitude, official GDACS alert colour, or the volume of independent media reporting for news-derived incidents. This event is currently rated Severe. Ratings can change as more information becomes available, and a rating is a monitoring signal rather than an official government assessment.
Safety guidance for fire situations
- Get out and stay out; never return for possessions.
- Stay low under smoke and close doors behind you to slow the spread.
- If a door feels hot, do not open it — use your second exit route.
- Call emergency services from outside, not from inside the building.
- Follow only official instructions from local authorities and emergency services — this page is a monitoring record, not an emergency alert.
Data and verification
This record was generated automatically from IFRC and de-duplicated against our archive. Early reports for any incident can be revised: locations get refined, magnitudes are recalculated and impact figures change as assessments arrive. We deliberately do not publish casualty numbers unless an official source states them. The original source report is linked at the top of this page.
Keep watching the situation on our live world incident map, browse every fires we track on the Fire tracker, or see today's global picture on the incidents today page.
Timeline and sources
Officially recorded
An official record exists from IFRC. That confirms the event was recorded; figures quoted from news reports are not confirmed by it.
How statuses are decided · the number of reports is never treated as confirmation.
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· received · event time 10 Sep 2026, 00:00 UTCFirst report Humanitarian agency report
First recorded from IFRC.
Times are when this site received each report, in UTC; the event time is shown where the source gave one. Copies of one syndicated story count as one report.
Conditions at the time
Light rain of 0.3 mm was recorded, and the temperature peaked at 33°C.
Weather reanalysis for this location and date via Open-Meteo.