South Fork Lost Creek Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 2,224 acres. Point of origin as reported, 47.866, -113.716.

Reported final size

2,160 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

2,224 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

2,031 acres

Discovered

August 13, 2011, 2:16 p.m. local time

Contained

October 15, 2011, 3:00 p.m. local time

Cause

Human, Undetermined

State

Montana

Land ownership at origin

Forest Service

Reporting unit

Flathead National Forest

Agency

Forest Service

Incident type

Wildfire

MTBS fire identifier

MT4786611371620110813

MTBS assessment

Initial

Fire occurrence record

FS-1501599

Perimeter map method

Infrared Interpretation

Note on the perimeter

USED IR TO ENHANCE HAND DRAWING OF PERIMETER

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: 10, from August 14, 2011 to October 11, 2011. 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.

Injuries

3

Most personnel assigned

178 on August 16, 2011

Most aircraft assigned

5

Cost reported by the teams

$2.3 million, in 2011 dollars

Cause on the reports

Human

Primary fuel model reported

Timber (Litter and Understory)

Suppression strategy reported

Confine

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 205 acres, on August 22, 2011.

Every fire of 2011 Montana fire history

• Woods Bay, MT18 miles northwest of the fire
• Bigfork, MT21 miles northwest of the fire
• Polson, MT24 miles southwest of the fire
• Lakeside, MT26 miles northwest of the fire
• Pablo, MT26 miles southwest of the fire
• Somers, MT28 miles northwest 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.