Big Country Fire

1988209,201 acresTexas

The Big Country Fire burned 209,201 acres, about 327 square miles, across 4 counties. It began on March 12, 1988.

Watch how it happened

Big Country Fire · 1988

How it happened

See how severely each place burned, revealed outward from where it started.

About this replay

IgnitionMarch 12, 1988Historical replay — order not recorded

Final area209,201 ac

Revealed—

Counties4

Fire milestones

Burn severityHigh, Moderate, Low, Unburned to low, Increased greenness

New York City, to scale301 square miles of land, drawn at the fire’s scale

Severity: Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (USGS, U.S. Forest Service), mapped from Landsat after the fire. Satellite fire detections begin in November 2000, so the order it burned in is not recorded and the map is revealed outward from the reported origin.

How severely it burned

Burn severity inside the final perimeter, classified from Landsat images taken before and after the fire.

Map of burn severity across the Big Country Fire

Burn severity by class
Severity	Share	Acres
Lowsurface fire, most trees survive	82%	171,482
Unburned to lowislands inside the perimeter, little change	16%	33,807
Increased greennessvegetation greener after the fire than before	1.4%	2,982
Not mappedcloud, shadow or water in the satellite images	0.4%	930

Most of the area inside the perimeter burned at low severity or not at all.

Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (U.S. Geological Survey and USDA Forest Service). Classes come from the change in a Landsat burn index (dNBR) between images before and after the fire; acres are each class’s share of the fire’s mapped area.

Where it burned

Acres inside each county, measured from the satellite-mapped perimeter.

Acres burned by county

Shackelford County	TX	178,136
Callahan County	TX	26,510
Throckmorton County	TX	4,622
Haskell County	TX	81

Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (USGS and U.S. Forest Service). Type recorded: Wildfire.