Fort Lewis Mtn Fire
The Fort Lewis Mtn Fire burned 1,349 acres in Virginia, in 1999. It was discovered on November 15, 1999. The cause was recorded as arson/incendiarism.
- Size
- 1,349 acres
- Discovered
- November 15, 1999
- Cause
- Human
Map
The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 1,523 acres. Point of origin as reported, 37.325, -80.092.
The record
- Reported final size
- 1,349 acres
- Burned area mapped by MTBS
- 1,523 acres
- Discovered
- November 15, 1999
- Cause
- Human, Arson/incendiarism
- State
- Virginia
- Reporting unit
- Virginia Department of Forestry
- Agency
- State or local agency
- Incident type
- Wildfire
- MTBS fire identifier
- VA3733108008419991115
- MTBS assessment
- Initial
- Fire occurrence record
- SWRA_VA_7304
The three sizes are three measurements: the size the agency reported when the fire was out, the burned area MTBS drew from satellite imagery before and after, and the GIS area inside the final perimeter, unburned islands included. They rarely agree exactly.
From the incident teams’ reports
The status summaries (ICS-209 forms) the incident teams filed: 4, from November 16, 1999 to November 19, 1999. These are the teams’ own estimates, written while the incident was running, and personnel is totaled from the resources each report lists. A fact the reports leave blank is not shown, and a zero on the form is treated as blank.
- Most structures threatened at once
- 10
- Most personnel assigned
- 80 on November 17, 1999
- Most aircraft assigned
- 2
- Cause on the reports
- Human
Acres reported by day
The largest rise between two days’ reports was 412 acres, on November 19, 1999.
Reported acres by day, as a table
| Day | Acres | Change from the day before |
|---|---|---|
| Nov 16, 1999 | 780 | |
| Nov 17, 1999 | 900 | +120 |
| Nov 18, 1999 | 937 | +37 |
| Nov 19, 1999 | 1,349 | +412 |
Other large fires in Virginia in 19991
| Fire | Acres | Start | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purgatory Mtn Fire | 1,285 | Aug 7, 1999 | Human |
Nearby
Sources
Burned areas and ignition dates from Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), a program of the US Geological Survey and the USDA Forest Service. Fire reports from Short, Karen C. 2022, Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014], 6th Edition, Forest Service Research Data Archive, doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6. Records before 2014 were joined by this site: a fire report to the burned area its MTBS identifier names, a perimeter to the burned area it lies in when the names or the sizes agree. Incident figures from ICS-209-PLUS: St. Denis, Lise A., Karen C. Short, Kathryn McConnell, Maxwell C. Cook, Nathan P. Mietkiewicz, Mollie Buckland and Jennifer K. Balch, 2023, All-hazards dataset mined from the US National Incident Management System 1999-2020, Scientific Data 10, 112, doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-01955-0; data on figshare, doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19858927.v3, licensed CC BY 4.0. This site matched each incident to the fire by the dataset’s own links where it has them, and otherwise by name, start date, state and size, and left out figures too large to be possible for a fire of its size.