The archived outline of the Ponderosa Fire spans about 5.3 km from west to east and 6.3 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Ponderosa way and Lumpkin road, 2 miles NW of Forbestown. 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 | Butte |
| Reported area in hectares | 1,625 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 5.3 × 6.3 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 30 August 2018 |
| Perimeter collection method as recorded | Digitized-Other |
What the perimeter shows
The two spans differ by only 1.0 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 4,016 acres; the interagency feature stores 4,015.7 GIS acres. The mapped value is 0.3 acres below the reported value (0.01%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 55. 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 Way Fire of 2014 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (4,045 acres). Its mapped spans are 5.0 by 4.7 km, west–east then south–north, versus 5.3 by 6.3 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.
Sources and map method
- Ponderosa Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Way 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.