Bully Fire (2014): mapping the 12,661-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Bully Fire spans about 11.5 km from west to east and 9.8 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Plantina Road at Bland Road, Igo. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE11 July 2014
County listingShasta
Reported area in hectares5,124 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline11.5 × 9.8 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive26 July 2014
Bully Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 11.5 by 9.8 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 1.7 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 12,661 acres; the interagency feature stores 12,658.7 GIS acres. The mapped value is 2.3 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: 1; structures destroyed: 18. 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 Canyon Fire of 2016 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (12,518 acres). Its mapped spans are 9.8 by 8.7 km, west–east then south–north, versus 11.5 by 9.8 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.