North Fire (2015): mapping the 4,250-acre footprint

The archived outline of the North Fire spans about 3.8 km from west to east and 7.3 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off Interstate 15, south of Oaks Hills, in the Cajon Pass area. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE17 July 2015
County listingSan Bernardino
Reported area in hectares1,720 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline3.8 × 7.3 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive21 July 2015
North Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 3.8 by 7.3 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The longer dimension runs north–south and is about 1.9 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 4,250 acres; the interagency feature stores 4,249.1 GIS acres. The mapped value is 0.9 acres below the reported value (0.02%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures damaged: 4; structures destroyed: 68. 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 Sand Fire of 2014 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (4,240 acres). Its mapped spans are 8.4 by 5.2 km, west–east then south–north, versus 3.8 by 7.3 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.