The archived outline of the Blue Cut Fire spans about 18.7 km from west to east and 18.9 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off of I-15 and Hwy 138, north of San Bernardino. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 16 August 2016 |
|---|---|
| County listing | San Bernardino |
| Reported area in hectares | 14,680 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 18.7 × 18.9 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 23 August 2016 |
What the perimeter shows
The two spans differ by only 0.2 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 36,274 acres; the interagency feature stores 36,266.7 GIS acres. The mapped value is 7.3 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: 3; structures destroyed: 321. 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 Donnell Fire of 2018 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (36,450 acres). Its mapped spans are 23.3 by 16.6 km, west–east then south–north, versus 18.7 by 18.9 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.
Sources and map method
- Blue Cut Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Donnell 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.