Rocky Fire (2015): mapping the 69,636-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Rocky Fire spans about 20.9 km from west to east and 21.4 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at near Morgan Valley Road and Rocky Creek Road, east of Clear Lake. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE29 July 2015
County listingLake
Reported area in hectares28,181 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline20.9 × 21.4 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive14 August 2015
Rocky Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 20.9 by 21.4 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 0.5 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 69,636 acres; the interagency feature stores 69,438.2 GIS acres. The mapped value is 197.8 acres below the reported value (0.28%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures damaged: 8; structures destroyed: 96. 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 Delta Fire of 2018 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (63,311 acres). Its mapped spans are 23.8 by 17.9 km, west–east then south–north, versus 20.9 by 21.4 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.

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.