Fourmile Canyon Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 5,859 acres. Point of origin as reported, 40.039, -105.393.

Reported final size

6,382 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

5,859 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

6,175 acres

Discovered

September 6, 2010, 10:00 a.m. local time

Contained

September 22, 2010, 6:00 p.m. local time

Cause

Human, Debris and open burning

State

Colorado

County

Boulder County

Land ownership at origin

Private

Reporting unit

Royal Gorge Field Office

Agency

Bureau of Land Management

Unit

COBLX

Incident type

Wildfire

Unique fire identifier

2010-CORGD-000321

MTBS fire identifier

CO4005110538520100906

MTBS assessment

Extended

Fire occurrence record

W-614089

Perimeter map method

Infrared Image

Perimeter records

2 on file for this fire; the largest is shown

Note on the perimeter

Mostly on Private, about 500 acres on Forest

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: 15, from September 6, 2010 to September 17, 2010. 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.

Structures destroyed

178 (167 residences, 6 commercial, 5 other)

Structures damaged

23 (14 residences, 9 other)

Most structures threatened at once

500

Injuries

4

Most personnel assigned

1,096 on September 10, 2010

Most aircraft assigned

6

People evacuated, at the most

Evacuations were reported; no count was filed

Cost reported by the teams

$9.9 million, in 2010 dollars

Cause on the reports

Human

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 3,168 acres, on September 7, 2010.

Every fire of 2010 Colorado fire history

• Pine Brook Hill, CO4 miles east of the fire
• Boulder, CO7 miles east of the fire
• Nederland, CO8 miles southwest of the fire
• Coal Creek, CO9 miles south of the fire
• Gunbarrel, CO12 miles east of the fire
• Niwot, CO13 miles east 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.