Wall Fire (2017): mapping the 6,033-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Wall Fire spans about 7.2 km from west to east and 9.3 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Chinese Wall Rd, north of Bangor. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE7 July 2017
County listingButte
Reported area in hectares2,441 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline7.2 × 9.3 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive9 January 2018
Wall Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 7.2 by 9.3 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 2.1 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 6,033 acres; the interagency feature stores 6,028.5 GIS acres. The mapped value is 4.5 acres below the reported value (0.07%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures threatened: 0; structures damaged: 10; structures destroyed: 91. 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 Mud Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (6,042 acres). Its mapped spans are 5.5 by 8.3 km, west–east then south–north, versus 7.2 by 9.3 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.