Cranston Fire (2018): mapping the 13,139-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Cranston Fire spans about 12.1 km from west to east and 10.2 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off Highway 74 and Control Road, east of Hemet. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE25 July 2018
County listingRiverside
Reported area in hectares5,317 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline12.1 × 10.2 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive4 January 2019
Perimeter collection method as recordedInfrared Interpretation
Cranston Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 12.1 by 10.2 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 2.0 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 13,139 acres; the interagency feature stores 13,229.2 GIS acres. The mapped value is 90.2 acres above the reported value (0.69%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 12. 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 Buck Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (13,417 acres). Its mapped spans are 9.6 by 9.2 km, west–east then south–north, versus 12.1 by 10.2 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.