The archived outline of the Delta Fire spans about 23.8 km from west to east and 17.9 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at I-5 and Lamoine, 2 miles NW of Lakehead. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.
| Start listed by CAL FIRE | 5 September 2018 |
|---|---|
| County listing | Shasta, Trinity |
| Reported area in hectares | 25,621 ha (converted from acres) |
| Extent of the mapped outline | 23.8 × 17.9 km (west–east × south–north) |
| Containment entry in the archive | 4 January 2019 |
| Perimeter collection method as recorded | Infrared Interpretation |
What the perimeter shows
The two spans differ by only 5.9 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 63,311 acres; the interagency feature stores 63,505.6 GIS acres. The mapped value is 194.6 acres above the reported value (0.31%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.
CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 42. 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 Rocky Fire of 2015 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (69,636 acres). Its mapped spans are 20.9 by 21.4 km, west–east then south–north, versus 23.8 by 17.9 km here. The longer axes run in different directions. Matching on acreage would miss that contrast.
Sources and map method
- Delta Fire · CAL FIRE incident record
- NIFC interagency history · source perimeter (GeoJSON)
- Rocky 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.