Lab 7 - Fire Hazard

In this lab we had to create a fire hazard map of the mountainous area in northern Los Angeles county where the station fire occurred. Luckily I already had the DEM raster, county boundary, and fire perimeter shapefiles from the Intro to GIS class last quarter, so I did not have to search for the majority of the information needed to perfrom this analysis. On the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection website I was able to find a map of fuel hazard rating based on vegetation. I then created a slope map using ArcMaps surface analysis tool. I then created a model that added the fuel hazard rating to the slope to create a fire hazard map. I changed classification of the fire hazard map to a continuous scale and changed the color ramp to 'yellow-red' in order to represent fire hazards.

Here is the map that I created.


As you can see, the area with the most flammable vegatation and slope conducive to the spreading of fires are the Malibu area and the mountainous areas where the station fire occured. ArcGIS was very useful in performing analysis of fire hazards due to its ability to combine data to create models based on factors that contribute to fire hazard.

The main challenge of this lab were understanding the rationale behind the model of fire hazard. We were assigned a tutorial to complete before creating our own fire hazard maps that taught us how to create models from raster data. The tutorial used data that had to be reclassified according to NFPA 1144 standards, but did not explain how those were created and what the rationale behind the reclassification. So when I set out to make my own fire hazard map it was difficult to come up with a way of reclassifying fuels and slope to match the NFPA 1144 standard. Instead I just created a rank order classification scheme for both the fuels and slope data and added the two together to derive the fire hazard map. Thus, while my fire hazard map does not conform to the NFPA 1144 standard it is still represents a rank ordered level of fire hazard within LA county.

Here is the map I created from the tutorial.