Six Mile Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 1,105 acres. Point of origin as reported, 45.263, -110.771.

Reported final size

1,202 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

1,105 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

1,044 acres

Discovered

July 30, 1999, 11:30 a.m. local time

Contained

August 4, 1999, 2:00 p.m. local time

Cause

Human, Undetermined

State

Montana

County

Park County

Land ownership at origin

Forest Service

Reporting unit

Custer Gallatin National Forest

Agency

Forest Service

Unit

MTCGF

Incident type

Wildfire

MTBS fire identifier

MT4525511076119990730

MTBS assessment

Extended

Fire occurrence record

FS-351799

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.

The status summaries (ICS-209 forms) the incident teams filed: 10, from July 30, 1999 to August 8, 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

2

Most personnel assigned

356 on August 1, 1999

Most aircraft assigned

6

Cost reported by the teams

$927,485, in 1999 dollars

Cause on the reports

Human

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 734 acres, on July 31, 1999.

Every fire of 1999 Montana fire history

• Pray, MT9 miles northeast of the fire
• Big Sky, MT29 miles west of the fire
• Livingston, MT29 miles north of the fire
• Bozeman, MT32 miles northwest of the fire
• Four Corners, MT34 miles northwest of the fire
• Belgrade, MT41 miles northwest of the fire

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.