Lab #7

When people think about fire they only think about the harm and bad things occur with fire. They think of fire destroy property, killing people, and endangering animals and trees. Fire does help us in many ways like keeping us warm at night, or enabling us to cook our food. Fire does do the environment and nature good, but under certain circumstances. Fires are fine in forest as long they are in controlled area. In California, we use fire to regenerate trees and to remove unneeded shrubs. Its true that some people want fire to burn forest or homes to hurt people, which bring us to 2009 Station Fire in Angeles National Forest.

The Station Fire was considered biggest fire in Los Angeles County. This was consider deadly because of how many days it burned for, which is about 51 days a fire ripped through 160,577 acres of land. The fire had destroyed 89 homes and 209 structures. What makes this fire worst is that it was arson, so someone had intentional set this fire. People have estimated the cost to contain this fire cost the government $93 million that not including the home owners suing for the mudslides that fire debris had come down from Station Fires.

The map that I chosen to build from scratch is a representation of the Station Fire affect on the local forest/park communities and recreational areas. I thought it will be interesting see how much of an area the fire had destroy compared to actual size of the Angeles National forest. Since I didn’t know too much about the northern LA county I thought it be good to add major interstate freeways to give better sense of direction and location of the fire. I added the multiple layers of fire progression to show where the fire has started and ended.

The result of the fire you can see that it destroy large part of the Angeles National Forest. It was really interesting that in ArcGIS you can lay map layer over one another to get a real idea of how much the forest in retrospect of the whole area too. There were at least seven recreational areas that were in close contact to the fire. As you can see the fire had destroy half of the forest area at station area. Technology is so great now that you can compile so much information together to support your theory.

Recently the Station Fire area has received $1.5 million dollar donation to be reforestation in the area. It will include 500,000 trees replanted. The Board of Air Quality management District hopes this effort will reduce the carbon dioxide emission. Usually forest areas are able to re-grow back but with so much damage it has little potential to do so. Human interaction must help and restore balance in nature.

Work Cited

Barney, Judith. "DelMarTimes.net | Fires Are Not All Bad." Del Mar, California - Del Mar Times Newspaper - Local News, Events, Restaurants, Homes, Hotels, Travel, School, Club, Highlands, Race and Fair Information. A Division of San Diego Suburban News. 7 Aug. 2008. Web. 25 May 2010. .

Behrens, Zach. "1st Reforestation Project in Station Fire Burn Area OK'd - LAist." LAist: Los Angeles News, Food, Arts & Events. 2 Apr. 2010. Web. 25 May 2010. .

Inciweb.org. "InciWeb the Incident Information System: Station Fire." InciWeb the Incident Information System: Current Incidents. 10 Nov. 2009. Web. 24 May 2010. .

Mail Foreign Service. "Visible from Space: The Massive Californian Wildfires Encircling Los Angeles Read More: Http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1210417/California-burning-Angry-Station-Fire-inches-closer-Los-Angeles-firefighters-die.html#ixzz0ouzm4Ido." California Burning: 'Angry' Station Fire Inches Closer to Los Angeles as Two Firefighters Die | Mail Online. 2 Sept. 2009. Web. 25 May 2010. .

Los Angeles County. "GIS Data." Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS. WordPress. 22 November 2009. .