Station Fire

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Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Figure 7

There is much to learn from the California Station Fire that occurred in 2009, especially with respect to political district lines. Figures 2 through 7 show the Congressional, Senate, and California State Assembly districts that were directly affected by the Station Fire. I am concerned  about the policy and funding behind fire stations.

                The source of funding varies for different fire stations, but they include sources such as municipal, county, state, and national governments².I am interested in the correlation between who is paying for the fire stations and the range of the various districts, focusing mainly on the Congressional Districts. Figure 3 shows that the Station Fire touched four different Congressional Districts, while Figure 2 shows the extent of each of these districts. It is interesting to note that District 25 covers much more area than any of the other districts. The inhabitants must be very spread out, but this means that people who live in Northern/Central California will be responsible for paying for relief for a fire that was hundreds of miles away from them.

                The reactions of various politicians to the Station Fire can be correlated to which district they belong to. In a Los Angeles Times article, both Senators and five Representatives signed a bill asking “Congress’ investigative arm to launch a sweeping probe” about the response time to the Station Fire⁴. Upon further research, I found that four of the Representatives correspond to the four districts directly affected by the fire, while the fifth Representative was District 32- located directly below District 26⁶. These Representatives would want to make sure that the firefighters in their districts were doing the best they possibly could so that in the future, such deadly fires could be avoided. The Senators would be concerned with the Station Fire because they are responsible for all of the voters in California, which includes the people affected by the fire.

One of the reasons that the politicians would support such a bill is that the largest fire in Los Angeles County history occurred while they were in office⁵. For the safety of their constituents, and to ensure they will not blame their government for the fire, these politicians asked for an in depth investigation.

The cost of fire departments is on the rise. The expenses for paying fire fighters and buying supplies are going up, while revenues are going down³. For this reason, it is important that we check that fire departments are effective. The bill that these Californian politicians signed is an important step in that process. Hopefully, in the future politicians whose districts were not directly affected by the Station Fire will support bills such as this one, since wild fires are a threat across the state.

Works Cited

1. CAL FIRE Home. Web. 23 Nov. 2010. <http://www.fire.ca.gov/>.
2. "Fire Department." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 23 Nov. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Department>.
3. Hill, John R. "Fire Department Funding - The 4 Upcoming Critical Financial Issues That Will Rock Your World." EzineArticles. 8 July 2008. Web. 23 Nov. 2010. <http://ezinearticles.com/?Fire-Department-Funding---The-4-Upcoming-Critical-Financial-Issues-That-Will-Rock-Your-World&id=1276194>.
4. Pringle, Paul. "Lawmakers Seek Broad Probe into Forest Service Response to Station Fire - Los Angeles Times." Los Angeles Times. 06 Aug. 2010. Web. 23 Nov. 2010. <http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/06/local/la-me-station-fire-20100806>.
5. Pringle, Paul. "Station Fire: Lead CDF Air Attack Officer Contradicts Forest Service Report." CALIFORNIA FIRE NEWS. 06 July 2010. Web. 23 Nov. 2010. <http://calfire.blogspot.com/2010/07/station-fire-lead-cdf-air-attack.html>.
6. "Representatives By State." United State House of Representatives. U.S. House of Representatives. Web. 22 Nov. 2010. <www.house.gov>. 

Grand Canyon in 3-D

 The Grand Canyon!!

This is the 3D Digital Elevation Model I created from data of the Grand Canyon.




Below is the aspect model. It is very colorful.

Above: The color ramped DEM. Blue is low and brown is high altitude. I chose this one because it reminds me of the brown desert with a river cutting through it.

Below: The color ramped DEM layered with the hillshade model.

To the left is the hillshade model I created.


Below is the slope model.... It is entirely red. This supposedly means that EVERYWHERE had an extremely steep slope. We know this is not the case because besides the canyon, Arizona is very flat. Several other people's slope models did not work, so my TA, Patrick, said we could include this weird red one.

I selected the Grand Canyon to do this assignment because it has a lot of topographical relief so you will be able to see drastic changes in altitude.

The extent of this DEM:
Top: 36.468
Right: -111.640
Bottom: 36.057
Left: -111.966

GCS:
GCS_North_American_1983

Map Projections

Questions Answered!
-The equator is close to 360 decimal degrees
-The northern and southern most graticule lines are also 360 degrees
        -They represent the north and south poles- they are just a point!




Conformal:
Mercator
Gall Stereographic

Equidistant:
Plate Carree
Sinusoidal

Equal Area:
Mollweide
Bonne

Using map projections is a necessary and dangerous game. Map makers can influence the way people think simply by choosing a different map projection. For example, in my "Equal Area" picture, Washington D.C. and Kabul look fairly close to each other in the Bonne map projection, while they look much further apart in the "GCS WGS 1984" projection.

It is also interesting to note that the distance between two points on a globe can change depending on the map projection you use. The distance from Washington D.C. to Kabul ranged from 6,700 miles to over 10,000 miles for my seven map projections. This can be extremely confusing, especially if you are using the maps to navigate.

Projections can be very helpful, though. No matter what you need a map for, there is most likely a projection that can help you display your data better. For example, if you want to map the temperature of the equator, you can use a Gall Stereographic map. This map gets skewed at the poles, but it does not matter for your purposes. If you want to map the temperature of the South Pole, there are specific polar projections you can use.

Different map projections can also liven up a map display. It can be more interesting to look at Bonne and Sinusoidal projections than many rectangular ones.

GIS

GIS as a data processing system has many pros and cons. Here are some things I discovered about it:

GIS is very user friendly. It is easy to learn to use because there is a lot of pointing and clicking- you don’t need to know any computer programming. It is also very aesthetically pleasing. You can change the colors of the background, add legends, and put little boxes around maps with very little effort. In GIS, you can relate the different maps and datasets to each other.

 It was simple to add a graph that displayed quantitatively what the map was showing qualitatively. You can also overlay different data sets easily by scaling them or adding an entire data column to a different layer. As a viewer, it is easy to tell what is going on in a GIS map because the legends are extremely helpful.

Even though we put in a bar graph, I feel as if GIS is very focused on the visual, qualitative aspects of graphs. This can be a good thing, but it might make analyzing data sets a little more difficult. Also, it was easy to add updates to the data/map (we added a new road), but it seemed unprofessional. Perhaps that is how all new roads are added, but I was concerned by how easy it was. You could just add whatever you wanted to without verifying that it is correct. You just pointed and clicked at where you wanted to go- there were no measurements or checks that the new road actually intersected the old road where we said it did. Maybe we will learn how to be more precise in the future.

Another thing I noticed was the importance of saving things in the correct places. This is something users have to learn to be exact about. I had to backtrack once because I saved a file in a space that was only one folder away from where it needed to be, but it may as well have been on a different computer since GIS could not find it. GIS is also very expensive. Most of the students in this class will probably never use GIS again, simply because we would never be able to pay $10,000 for a data processing system.