Caribou Creek Fire

The burned area boundary MTBS mapped from Landsat imagery, 2,098 acres. Point of origin as reported, 64.692, -145.782.

Reported final size

1,436 acres

Burned area mapped by MTBS

2,098 acres

Area inside the final perimeter

2,049 acres

Discovered

August 11, 2013

Cause

Human, Equipment and vehicle use

State

Alaska

Land ownership at origin

State

Reporting unit

Fairbanks Area

Agency

DVF

Unit

AKDNS

Incident type

Wildfire

Unique fire identifier

2013-AKFAS-000679

MTBS fire identifier

AK6469214578220130811

MTBS assessment

Extended

Fire occurrence record

AK-FAS-2013-311679

Perimeter map method

Image Interpretation

Note on the perimeter

Fire perimeter modified using Landsat Image Service. Image ID: LC08_L2SP_068015_20130915_20200912_02_T1.

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: 8, from August 11, 2013 to October 1, 2013. 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

28

Most personnel assigned

56 on August 12, 2013

Most aircraft assigned

1

Cost reported by the teams

$1.2 million, in 2013 dollars

Cause on the reports

Human

Primary fuel model reported

Timber (Litter and Understory)

Suppression strategy reported

Point zone protection

Acres reported by day

The largest rise between two days’ reports was 700 acres, on August 12, 2013.

Every fire of 2013 Alaska fire history

• Pleasant Valley, AK35 miles northwest of the fire
• Salcha, AK35 miles west of the fire
• Eielson Air Force Base, AK38 miles west of the fire
• North Pole, AK46 miles west of the fire
• Badger, AK52 miles west of the fire
• Fairbanks, AK58 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.