The archived outline of the Railroad Fire spans about 10.3 km from west to east and 10.7 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Highway 41, south of Fish Camp. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 29 August 2017 |
|---|---|
| County listing | Madera |
| Reported area in hectares | 5,021 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 10.3 × 10.7 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 9 January 2018 |
What the perimeter shows
The two spans differ by only 0.3 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 12,407 acres; the interagency feature stores 12,371.1 GIS acres. The mapped value is 35.9 acres below the reported value (0.29%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
A similar-sized fire for comparison
The Canyon Fire of 2016 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (12,518 acres). Its mapped spans are 9.8 by 8.7 km, west–east then south–north, versus 10.3 by 10.7 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.
Sources and map method
- Railroad Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Canyon 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.