Maria Fire (2019): mapping the 9,999-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Maria Fire spans about 10.5 km from west to east and 8.1 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at off of Bradley Road and Solano Verde Dr, Top of South Mt, Santa Paula. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE31 October 2019
County listingVentura
Reported area in hectares4,046 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline10.5 × 8.1 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive6 November 2019
Perimeter collection method as recordedMixed Collection Methods
Maria Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 10.5 by 8.1 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 2.4 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 9,999 acres; the interagency feature stores 10,042.5 GIS acres. The mapped value is 43.5 acres above the reported value (0.43%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures destroyed: 4. 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 Elm Fire of 2017 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (10,000 acres). Its mapped spans are 8.9 by 9.0 km, west–east then south–north, versus 10.5 by 8.1 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.