On August 26,
2009, a fire started in the Angeles National Forest near a ranger station. The
Station Fire in north of Los Angeles was the largest and deadliest of the fires
that occurred in Southern California in 2009, burning 160,577 acres killing two
firefighters, destroying hundreds of structures, and forcing thousands of
residents to evacuate because it began in late August. Although wildfires have
numerous effects on surrounding ecosystems, communities, and so on, the focus
of the thematic map above is to show the effect of the fires on highways,
airports. and hospitals.
The fires
occurred north of Los Angeles County on the mountain areas. The red and orange
color outline is the perimeter of the station fire as of August 29th,
2009, which is the date of the onset of the fire. Just a few hours later, the
fires expanded to the dark orange outline areas, from 45,000 acres to more than
100,000 acres towards east and west directions of the original fire area. a
situation can easily observed that the freeway number 2 was damaged directly by
the fire. From the fire continued to grow, larger portion of the freeway number
2 was damaged.
On August 30,
the fire expanded from south to north.(In the light orange area). The fire
expanded quickly that the fire reached the yellow outlined area on the north
direction. Freeway 2 was damaged by the fire more seriously. Besides, since the
final fire area was almost 20 times larger than the original fire area, many
freeways were destroyed by the fire. The fire area was quite near to the
freeway number 14, 210, and 133. It was not good news because many people use
the freeways. From the fire many people could be suffered by the fire .
The high density
of the freeways provided us information that there were many communities with
high density of population. Therefore, the fact that the fire was caused by
arson makes sense since the fire began so close to numerous communities; an
arsonist wishing to cause as much damage as possible would choose a densely
populated area as a target. Moreover, the combination of high temperatures, low
humidity and a large quantity of tinder-dry fuel, some of which had not burnt
for decades, allowed the normal fires to quickly explode out of control despite
the lack of winds to spread the flames. Because of these conditions, along with
extreme terrain in many undeveloped areas that slowed access to burn areas,
firefighting was so difficult. Therefore, the fire expanded rapidly towards the
north mountain areas, where there were a large amount of vegetations. Although
the firefighting was difficult and the fire expanded rapidly, the fire
containment efforts could not be underestimated. It was not a coincidence that
freeway number 210 was not damaged. The fire that didn’t expand southwards was
also the results of effective firefighting, keeping numerous people away from
danger.
work
cited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_California_wildfires
2.
Angry fire’ roars across 100,000 California acres ,Aug.
2009
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-08-31/us/california.wildfires_1_mike-dietrich-firefighters-safety-incident-commander?_s=PM:US
3.
Current Fire Information
http://www.fire.ca.gov/
4.
Station fire was arson, officials say; homicide investigation begins, September
3, 2009
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/09/station-fire-was-arson-homicide- investigation-begins.html
