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 29^th, 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

1. 2009 California wildfires” Wikipedia

  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