Wildfires of 1999

Horse Creek Fire

1999Elko County, NevadaWildfire

The Horse Creek Fire burned 2,400 acres in Elko County, Nevada, in 1999. It was discovered on August 20, 1999, and contained on August 22, 1999. The cause was recorded as natural.

Size
2,400 acres
Discovered
August 20, 1999
Contained
August 22, 1999
Cause
Natural

Map

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 2,874 acres. Point of origin as reported, 41.836, -114.235.

The record

Reported final size
2,400 acres
Burned area mapped by MTBS
2,874 acres
Area inside the final perimeter
2,123 acres
Discovered
August 20, 1999, 3:21 p.m. local time
Contained
August 22, 1999, 11:21 a.m. local time
Cause
Natural
State
Nevada
County
Elko County
Land ownership at origin
Bureau of Land Management
Reporting unit
Elko District Office
Agency
Bureau of Land Management
Unit
NVEKD
Incident type
Wildfire
MTBS fire identifier
NV4181811434019990820
MTBS assessment
Extended
Fire occurrence record
W-91414

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: 2. 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 personnel assigned
83 on August 21, 1999
Most aircraft assigned
1
Cause on the reports
Lightning or other natural

Other large fires in Nevada in 199912

FireAcresStartCause
Dun Glenn Complex (Poker Brown) Fire231,389Aug 4, 1999Natural
Sadler Complex199,288Aug 5, 1999Natural
New Pass Complex (New Pass-Antelope) Fire139,755Aug 4, 1999Natural
Eureka Complex (Trail Canyon) Fire95,793Aug 5, 1999Natural
Sombrero Fire80,448Aug 4, 1999Natural
Clover Fire73,077Jul 8, 1999Human
Jungo Complex72,179Aug 4, 1999Natural
Frenchie Fire54,677Aug 4, 1999Natural
Rose Fire48,479Aug 6, 1999Natural
New Pass Fire47,435
Fish Complex (Fish Springs) Fire47,133Aug 23, 1999Natural
Badger Fire40,000Aug 24, 1999Natural

Every fire of 1999 Nevada fire history

Nearby

Sources

Perimeters from the National Interagency Fire Center’s Interagency Fire Perimeter History, compiled from the Forest Service, BLM, BIA, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, the Alaska Interagency Fire Center and CAL FIRE. 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.