South Fork 3 Bar Fire
The South Fork 3 Bar Fire burned 1,465 acres in Powder River County, Montana, in 2010. It was discovered on November 2, 2010, and contained on November 3, 2010. The cause was recorded as debris and open burning. Incident teams reported 1 structure destroyed.
- Size
- 1,465 acres
- Discovered
- November 2, 2010
- Contained
- November 3, 2010
- Cause
- Human
- Structures destroyed
- 1
Map
The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 1,534 acres. Point of origin as reported, 45.032, -105.675.
The record
- Reported final size
- 1,465 acres
- Burned area mapped by MTBS
- 1,534 acres
- Area inside the final perimeter
- 1,466 acres
- Discovered
- November 2, 2010, 3:09 p.m. local time
- Contained
- November 3, 2010, 6:00 p.m. local time
- Cause
- Human, Debris and open burning
- State
- Montana
- County
- Powder River County
- Land ownership at origin
- Private
- Reporting unit
- Miles City Field Office
- Agency
- Bureau of Land Management
- Unit
- MTNRC
- Incident type
- Wildfire
- MTBS fire identifier
- MT4501710565420101102
- MTBS assessment
- Initial
- Fire occurrence record
- W-615255
- Note on the perimeter
- Corrected GPS coordinates or equivalent precision
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.
From the incident teams’ reports
The status summaries (ICS-209 forms) the incident teams filed: 2. 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
- 1
- Most structures threatened at once
- 2
- Most personnel assigned
- 26 on November 3, 2010
- Cost reported by the teams
- $17,000, in 2010 dollars
- Cause on the reports
- Human
- Primary fuel model reported
- Timber (Grass and Understory)
- Suppression strategy reported
- Confine
Other large fires in Montana in 20105
| Fire | Acres | Start | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raven Fire | 27,898 | Aug 21, 2010 | Natural |
| Stump Gulch Fire | 9,870 | Aug 21, 2010 | Human |
| Davis Fire | 2,015 | Aug 26, 2010 | Human |
| East Bowdoin Su E F Fire | 1,240 | Apr 2, 2010 | |
| Homestead Fire | 485 | Mar 29, 2010 | Human |
Nearby
Sources
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.