King Fire (2014): mapping the 97,717-acre footprint

The archived outline of the King Fire spans about 28.1 km from west to east and 41.9 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Near Pollock Pines. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE13 September 2014
County listingEl Dorado
Reported area in hectares39,545 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline28.1 × 41.9 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive9 October 2014
King Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 28.1 by 41.9 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 13.8 km. That does not make this a circular burn: the dimensions measure the outermost coordinates, leaving indentations and gaps invisible. Use the polygon itself, rather than its enclosing rectangle, to check whether a location intersects the footprint.

Two estimates of area

The incident report gives 97,717 acres; the interagency feature stores 97,684.6 GIS acres. The mapped value is 32.4 acres below the reported value (0.03%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 80. Those counts come from the incident record. A building inside the perimeter cannot be assigned a damage category from this map alone.

A similar-sized fire for comparison

The County Fire of 2018 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (90,000 acres). Its mapped spans are 20.6 by 37.6 km, west–east then south–north, versus 28.1 by 41.9 km here. The broad proportions are comparable. That does not establish that fuel, wind or suppression tactics were similar.

Sources and map method

Spans use the geographic extremes of a generalized boundary, converted to kilometres at its middle latitude. They are approximate map dimensions, not distances travelled by flames. The GIS acreage is the source attribute, not an area recalculated from the simplified outline.