Mineral Fire (2016): mapping the 7,050-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Mineral Fire spans about 5.4 km from west to east and 9.0 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off Hwy 198 & Mineral Springs Rd, W of Coalinga. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE8 August 2016
County listingFresno
Reported area in hectares2,853 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline5.4 × 9.0 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive18 August 2016
Perimeter collection method as recordedGPS Ground
Mineral Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 5.4 by 9.0 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The longer dimension runs north–south 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 7,050 acres; the interagency feature stores 6,790.3 GIS acres. The mapped value is 259.7 acres below the reported value (3.68%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 2. 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 Chariot Fire of 2013 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (7,055 acres). Its mapped spans are 7.4 by 8.8 km, west–east then south–north, versus 5.4 by 9.0 km here. The broad proportions are comparable. That does not establish that fuel, wind or suppression tactics were similar.

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.