On August 29th, 2010, as temperature in Los Angeles reached triple digits fires raged across the city. Heavily located in the northern region of Los Angeles, nearby communities such as that of La Canada Flintridge and Glendale were tremendously affected by these raging fires. In our lab this week we were to use the ArcGIS program to depict the county of Los Angeles, along with projected reference maps of the Station Fires which occured during late August and early September. After doing so we were to analyze a specific aspect of the fire and how that affected nearby communities of Los Angeles. After accessing the Mapshare Database off the UCLA website, we were given options to encorporate and embed another layer to our Los Angeles County and Fires projection.
From http://gis.ats.ucla.edu/Mapshare, I chose the layer Important and Major Roads in Los Angeles County in order to observe how the expansion and the location of the fire had affected major transportation in this area. This presented and completed the above layout of Los Angeles County in green, along with the progression and expansion of the station fire in pink, violet and yellow colors, along with all the roads represented by red lines. As we can clearly see from the projection above, the fire was heavely concentrated north of the city of Los Angeles. According to wikipedia.org and CNN, the fire originated near the community of La Canada Flintridge. Assuming that other communities such as Glendale are nearby.
In looking at the expansion of the fire, one can see that from day 1 (Aug. 29th/yellow) to one of the final days of the fire (Sept. 2nd/pink) it had more or so traveled North, away from Downtown Los Angeles. Taking a look at day 1, there is one major road located in that region, which provides a more direct passage from The San Fernando Valley to the northern regions of the County of Los Angeles, over the mountains. According to CNN and the L.A. Times, on August 29th people of La Canada and Glendale were advised to evacuate the premises, and to stay away from major surrounding roads, especially those traveling north.
In this projection we see that there are only 2 major roads which lead directly to that northern part of the County of Los Angeles, which are then eventually blocked off due to the expansion of the fire from day 1 to day 2. This implies a greater deal of traffic on the main roads towards Downtown Los Angeles, freeways and highways such as the 101N and 118W. We also have to remember that this layer was just a depiction of the major roads near the epicenter of the fire, meaning there are also other local streets which were completely closed off. This results in detours in city bus routes. Which entails that more people were closer to the inner city, which ultimately results in an increase in numbers of local transportation used per square mile, which furthermore leads to more crowded buses and difficulty in ease of transportation. The fire without a doubt caused there to be an increase in traffic in Los Angeles roads and highways.
Another interesting point which one can defer from such an image is how the fires affected the Los Angeles' economy through transportation throughout the station fires. On the one hand the fires could have possibly caused an increase in the number of drivers in Los Angeles due to the increase in density of population towards the inner city after the evacuations. Only through numbers and calculations can one figure out if the increase in expense of drivers and their salaries outweighed the number of people who decided to use local transportation during the fires.
Bibliography
"2009 California Wildfires." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 12 May 2010.
"High temperatures, dry conditions fuel wildfires." CNN on the Web. 30 Aug. 2009.
Lin, Rong-Gong. "Los Angeles fire map: Mt. Wilson, Tujunga, Acton, Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre." Los Angeles Times Local. 11 Sept. 2009.
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