Hirz Fire (2018): mapping the 46,150-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Hirz Fire spans about 14.1 km from west to east and 24.8 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off Gilman and Moore Creek Campground, east of Lakehead. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

What the perimeter shows

The longer dimension runs north–south and is about 1.8 times the shorter one. A circular buffer drawn around the incident point would hide that difference. A road or settlement at the same distance from the point could fall inside or outside the mapped footprint depending on its direction.

Two estimates of area

The incident report gives 46,150 acres; the interagency feature stores 40,608.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 5,541.6 acres below the reported value (12.01%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

A similar-sized fire for comparison

The Chimney Fire of 2016 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (46,235 acres). Its mapped spans are 19.7 by 16.9 km, west–east then south–north, versus 14.1 by 24.8 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.

Sources and map method

• Hirz Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
• NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
• Chimney 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.