Silver Fire (2013): mapping the 20,292-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Silver Fire spans about 19.3 km from west to east and 7.8 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Poppet Flats Rd near Hwy 243, south of Banning. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE7 August 2013
County listingRiverside
Reported area in hectares8,212 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline19.3 × 7.8 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive12 August 2013
Perimeter collection method as recordedGPS-Unknown
Silver Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 19.3 by 7.8 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The longer dimension runs east–west and is about 2.5 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 20,292 acres; the interagency feature stores 20,308.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 16.4 acres above the reported value (0.08%). 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: 48. 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 Lion Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (18,900 acres). Its mapped spans are 12.5 by 15.0 km, west–east then south–north, versus 19.3 by 7.8 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.