Week 8

The Station Fire was centered in the Los Angeles area and was active from August 26^th, 2009 until it was fully contained on October 16^th of the same year.  It is the largest fire in the history of the county.  According to the Incident Information System, an arsonist started the fire, and the state is pressing homicidal charges against this individual due to the deaths and destruction associated with his crime.  Two firefighters’ deaths are attributed to the fire because they were killed when their vehicle crashed over a cliff while trying to get away from the flames.  In addition, 22 people were injured and the fire is said to have destroyed 209 structures, including 89 homes.  During the height of the fire, it was possible to see it from space, according to an inset in Scientific American.  Overall, the Station Fire burned 160,577 acres and came within close proximity of Glendale, La Cañada, Flintridge, and the Sunland neighborhoods in Los Angeles, among others.

While many maps focus on the size of the fire, my thematic map focuses on the destruction to the Los Angeles County landmarks, recreational parks, and churches in the burn area.  The maps attached analyze how these entities were affected by the Station Fire.  Churches were included as one of the layers because of their important cultural value in American society today. My initial hypothesis was while churches would probably not be located in the park’s boundaries of the fire and would therefore be less likely to be affected, it is highly possible that recreational parks and county landmarks would be disturbed by the flames.

Using data from the UCLA GIS page and the Los Angeles County GIS Data Portal, I constructed a map showing the spatial relationship between the maximum burn area of the Station Fire and the location of the landmarks detailed above.  The research question behind this project changed; at first, it was to understand how the fire affected historic and archaeological sites in the area.  Unfortunately, I could not find the data online, and decided instead to analyze the effect upon churches, recreational parks, and landmarks in the burn area.  

What this map displays is the Station Fire’s containment in a certain area; while there was destruction, most of the cultural elements analyzed in this study were left largely unharmed.  There are a few county landmarks close to the fire in the southeastern corner of the burn area, and it is difficult to determine to what extent they were affected by the burn area.  Since the fire’s boundaries were in the national park, many areas that would have the structures and spaces I was looking for were not affected. 

Beyond the immediate conclusions and implications for this project, it is worth briefly talking about GIS and its potential for analyzing future disasters and research about spatial relationships.  GIS has potential for communicating information about the effects of fire and other disasters, and can analyze destruction zones.  In addition, the software is useful for visualizing and analyzing spatial relationships between natural phenomena, features, and human constructions. 

Bibliography

Bloomekatz, Ari. "Station fire is largest in L.A. County's modern history." Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles] 2 Sep 2009, Web. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/09/station-fire-is-largest-in-la-county-history.html>.

County of Los Angeles. Los Angeles County GIS Data Portal. 2013. Web. <http://egis3.lacounty.gov/dataportal/category/data_source/parks-and-recreation/>.

Incident Information System. Station Fire Update Sept. 27, 2009. 2009. Web. <http://inciweb.org/incident/article/9640/>.

"Los Angeles County's Station Fire visible from space."Scientific American. 03 09 2009: n. page. Web. 20 Mar. 2013. <http://www.scientificamerican.com/gallery_directory.cfm?photo_id=814F93A4-9798-6444-FD2D5D2E122D9563>.

University of California, Los Angeles. Mapshare: UCLA's Spatial Data Repository. Los Angeles: , 2006. Web. <http://gis.ats.ucla.edu/Mapshare/>.