Cottonwood Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 2,541 acres. Point of origin as reported, 33.736, -116.818.

Reported final size

2,409 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

2,541 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

2,411 acres

Discovered

August 27, 2009, 5:10 p.m. local time

Contained

August 31, 2009, 6:00 p.m. local time

Cause

Human, Power generation/transmission/distribution

State

California

County

Riverside County

Land ownership at origin

Forest Service

Reporting unit

San Bernardino National Forest

Agency

Forest Service

Unit

CABDF

Incident type

Wildfire

Unique fire identifier

2009-CABDF-000142

MTBS fire identifier

CA3374611682220090827

MTBS assessment

Initial

Fire occurrence record

FS-1484056

Perimeter records

2 on file for this fire; the largest is shown

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: 9, from August 28, 2009 to September 1, 2009. 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

5

Injuries

4

Most personnel assigned

767 on August 30, 2009

Most aircraft assigned

6

People evacuated, at the most

Evacuations were reported; no count was filed

Cost reported by the teams

$3.4 million, in 2009 dollars

Primary fuel model reported

Chaparral (6 feet)

Suppression strategy reported

Full suppression

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 1,090 acres, on August 29, 2009.

Every fire of 2009 California fire history

• Valle Vista, CA4 miles west of the fire
• Idyllwild-Pine Cove, CA5 miles east of the fire
• Idyllwild, CA6 miles east of the fire
• East Hemet, CA7 miles west of the fire
• San Jacinto, CA9 miles west of the fire
• Hemet, CA9 miles west 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.