The archived outline of the Garza Fire spans about 24.2 km from west to east and 19.8 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Tar Canyon Road, near Avenal. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 9 July 2017 |
|---|---|
| County listing | Kings |
| Reported area in hectares | 19,692 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 24.2 × 19.8 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 9 January 2018 |
What the perimeter shows
The two spans differ by only 4.4 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 48,660 acres; the interagency feature stores 48,886.5 GIS acres. The mapped value is 226.5 acres above the reported value (0.47%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 1. 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 Erskine Fire of 2016 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (48,019 acres). Its mapped spans are 23.8 by 19.8 km, west–east then south–north, versus 24.2 by 19.8 km here. The broad proportions are comparable. That does not establish that fuel, wind or suppression tactics were similar.
Sources and map method
- Garza Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Erskine Fire · comparison incident
- Comparison perimeter · interagency record
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.