Rankin Creek Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 2,091 acres. Point of origin as reported, 44.372, -114.730.

Reported final size

6,710 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

2,091 acres

Discovered

August 11, 2000, 7:30 a.m. local time

Contained

September 2, 2000, 9:00 a.m. local time

Cause

Natural

State

Idaho

Land ownership at origin

Forest Service

Reporting unit

Salmon-Challis National Forest

Agency

Forest Service

Incident type

Wildfire

MTBS fire identifier

ID4434311470620000811

MTBS assessment

Extended

Fire occurrence record

FS-358796

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: 23, from August 11, 2000 to September 2, 2000. 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

33

Most personnel assigned

702 on August 18, 2000

Most aircraft assigned

3

Cost reported by the teams

$3.9 million, in 2000 dollars

Cause on the reports

Lightning or other natural

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 3,100 acres, on August 18, 2000.

Every fire of 2000 Idaho fire history

• Challis, ID26 miles east of the fire
• Sun Valley, ID50 miles south of the fire
• Ketchum, ID51 miles south of the fire
• Hailey, ID62 miles south of the fire
• Bellevue, ID67 miles south of the fire
• Salmon, ID69 miles northeast of the 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.