County Fire (2018): mapping the 90,000-acre footprint

The archived outline of the County Fire spans about 20.6 km from west to east and 37.6 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at east of Lake Berryessa. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE30 June 2018
County listingNapa, Yolo
Reported area in hectares36,422 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline20.6 × 37.6 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive4 January 2019
Perimeter collection method as recordedMixed Methods
County Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 20.6 by 37.6 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The longer dimension runs north–south and is about 1.8 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 90,000 acres; the interagency feature stores 89,836.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 163.6 acres below the reported value (0.18%). 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: 29. 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 Long Valley Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (83,733 acres). Its mapped spans are 39.7 by 30.1 km, west–east then south–north, versus 20.6 by 37.6 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.