The Mendocino Complex fire grew this week to become the biggest wildfire in California history, scorching 300,086 acres by Wednesday, Aug. 8. The devastating blaze already destroyed 116 homes and 105 other buildings, with another 10,300 structures still threatened, according to the US Forest Service.
This latest disaster follows a national trend of less frequent wildfires growing bigger than previous ones. To understand the new breadth of these fires, its helpful to add some perspective, like the fact that the Mendocino fire is bigger than 25 countries, including Singapore and Bahrain, according to WorldAtlas.
Here are more comparisons with places and buildings that are hopefully familiar enough to explain just how enormous the Mendocino Complex fire has become.
600 Disneyland Resorts[hhmc]
Disney says its Anaheim resort is approximately 500 acres big, which means it would take 600 of them to cover the area scorched by the Mendocino fire. The resort includes hotels, shops and two theme parks, including Disneyland, which recently maintained its spot as the worlds second most popular park.
5 million suburban homes[hhmc]
The house used for exterior shots in the “Brady Bunch” TV series was recently bought by HGTV. The three-bedroom home was listed at 2,477 square feet, not counting the lot. You would need to build 5,277,248 such homes to match the size of the Mendocino fire.
1 Japanese city[hhmc]
The Mendocino fire is roughly 35 square miles bigger than the Japanese city of Sapporo, home of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. Thats the baseball team Shohei Ohtani played for before joining the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Ohtanis home run helped the Angels beat the Detroit Tigers 11-5 last night.
200,000 football fields[hhmc]
When the Los Angeles Rams football team faces the Baltimore Ravens for Thursdays first game of the preseason, they will battle on a standard football field, which covers about 1.3 acres. The Mendocino fire is so big it could fit 226,940 of those fields.
70,000 warehouses[hhmc]
Golden State Foods recently opened a 183,000-square-foot Fontana warehouse, complete with a dedicated “banana room,” to service Starbucks locations in Southern California. You would need 71,430 of those facilities to fill a space as big as the area burned by the Mendocino fire.
1,948 wetlands[hhmc]
The city of Long Beach is poised to get 154 acres of the Los Cerritos Wetlands from Beach Oil Minerals in exchange for a separate 5-acre patch. If the city were to receive 1,948 such plots, that would be enough land to cover the Mendocino fire.
The Twin Cities[hhmc]
The National Weather Service posted this graphic on Twitter to show the impact of the Mendocino fire before it grew to 300,000 acres.
As of last night the Mendocino Complex fire in California was the largest in their state records with over 290,000 acres burned. To give some context of how large an area has been impacted so far, here's a look at that approximate area superimposed over the Twin Cities metro. pic.twitter.com/b0QuytljYo
— NWS Twin Cities (@NWSTwinCities) August 8, 2018
1 off-road oasis[hhmc]
The California Off-Road Recreation and Conservation Act would preserve about 300,000 acres of Southern California desert for off-road vehicle use, essentially the same size as the Mendocino Complex fire. The plan was recently approved by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Half of Orange County[hhmc]
At 948 square miles, Orange County is about twice the size of Californias biggest blaze. NBCUniversal has created a tool to compare any city to the size of the Mendocino Complex fire.
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