The archived outline of the Lake Fire spans about 25.4 km from west to east and 15.3 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Off Hwy 38, south of Big Bear Lake. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 17 June 2015 |
|---|---|
| County listing | San Bernardino |
| Reported area in hectares | 12,691 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 25.4 × 15.3 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 1 August 2015 |
What the perimeter shows
The longer dimension runs east–west and is about 1.7 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 31,359 acres; the interagency feature stores 31,284.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 74.6 acres below the reported value (0.24%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
A similar-sized fire for comparison
The Eiler Fire of 2014 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (32,416 acres). Its mapped spans are 12.8 by 22.7 km, west–east then south–north, versus 25.4 by 15.3 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.
Sources and map method
- Lake Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Eiler 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.