Pawnee Fire (2018): mapping the 15,180-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Pawnee Fire spans about 11.9 km from west to east and 14.6 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Pawnee Rd & New Long Valley Rd, northeast of Clearlake Oaks. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE23 June 2018
County listingLake
Reported area in hectares6,143 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline11.9 × 14.6 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive4 January 2019
Perimeter collection method as recordedGPS Air
Pawnee Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 11.9 by 14.6 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 2.8 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 15,180 acres; the interagency feature stores 15,196.9 GIS acres. The mapped value is 16.9 acres above the reported value (0.11%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures damaged: 6; structures destroyed: 22. 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 Creek Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (15,619 acres). Its mapped spans are 11.5 by 10.1 km, west–east then south–north, versus 11.9 by 14.6 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.