FirstAlerts
Wildfires

Woolley Fire Burns 123 Acres in South Dakota, Federal Fire Record Shows

The National Interagency Fire Center's incident record lists the wildfire at 123 acres with no containment figure yet reported; the incident is still developing.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 12, 2026, 3:04 p.m. ET
A named the fire is burning in South Dakota, according to the incident record published by in its open incident dataset. That record lists the fire at acres and gives a local date of , with discovery timestamped . No containment figure has been reported for the fire. The situation is developing, and acreage in federal fire records is routinely revised as mapping improves. record lists the fire's cause as "." It carries no further detail on the cause, on the fire's precise location within the state, or on any damage, evacuations or injuries.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 112 Aug 2026, 19:04current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.