Porcupine Ranch Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 3,768 acres. Point of origin as reported, 38.581, -109.333.

Reported final size

3,432 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

3,768 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

3,424 acres

Discovered

August 27, 2008, 12:30 p.m. local time

Contained

October 3, 2008, 4:00 p.m. local time

Cause

Natural

State

Utah

County

Grand County

Reporting unit

Manti-Lasal National Forest

Agency

Forest Service

Unit

UTMLF

Incident type

Wildfire

Unique fire identifier

2008-UTMLF-000038

MTBS fire identifier

UT3856110929920080827

MTBS assessment

Extended

Fire occurrence record

FS-1474692

Perimeter records

2 on file for this fire; the largest is shown

Note on the perimeter

Wildland Fire

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: 14, from August 27, 2008 to November 4, 2008. 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

110

Injuries

1

Most personnel assigned

407 on August 30, 2008

Most aircraft assigned

5

People evacuated, at the most

Evacuations were reported; no count was filed

Cost reported by the teams

$2 million, in 2008 dollars

Cause on the reports

Lightning or other natural

Primary fuel model reported

Timber (Litter and Understory)

Suppression strategy reported

Full suppression

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 1,250 acres, on August 28, 2008.

Every fire of 2008 Utah fire history

• Moab, UT12 miles west of the fire
• Monticello, UT49 miles south of the fire
• Loma, CO51 miles northeast of the fire
• Redlands, CO51 miles northeast of the fire
• Fruita, CO51 miles northeast of the fire
• Grand Junction, CO54 miles northeast 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.