Pier Fire (2017): mapping the 36,556-acre footprint

The archived outline of the Pier Fire spans about 16.1 km from west to east and 15.6 km from south to north. CAL FIRE places the incident at Highway 190, east of Springville. The mapped boundary provides a second way to locate the event: it shows the extent around that reference location.

Start listed by CAL FIRE29 August 2017
County listingTulare
Reported area in hectares14,794 ha (converted from acres)
Extent of the mapped outline16.1 × 15.6 km (west–east × south–north)
Containment entry in the archive9 January 2018
Pier Fire historical perimeter; north up. Approximate spans 16.1 by 15.6 kilometres.
Generalized historical perimeter. Source: NIFC interagency fire perimeter history.

What the perimeter shows

The two spans differ by only 0.6 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 36,556 acres; the interagency feature stores 36,619.4 GIS acres. The mapped value is 63.4 acres above the reported value (0.17%). This compares two published measurements, not two observation times. The difference cannot be read as fire growth.

CAL FIRE also records structures threatened: 540; structures destroyed: 2. 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 Donnell Fire of 2018 is the closest match by reported acreage in this 100-case collection (36,450 acres). Its mapped spans are 23.3 by 16.6 km, west–east then south–north, versus 16.1 by 15.6 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.