Mapping the Eaton Fire

And yet, there were pockets of resilience. Some structures were merely damaged; some emerged unscathed. This fact is better visualized by a histogram. 

We see again that most of Altadena was either completely or significantly destroyed. But there are enough buildings with no damage – roughly 5,000 – to justify an analysis of those buildings. Are they clustered in certain areas? Are there oak trees located in those areas? 

And at the building-footprint level…

A few things are worth pointing out here. One, the block groups with the most oak trees are also the block groups with the most fire damage. This sounds counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense. These are simply the block groups closest to the fire zone, which started in the undeveloped area to the north. Because oak trees are more likely to be found in those undeveloped areas, they are also more likely to be found in high-fire-damage zones. 

The building-footprint map allows us to zoom in and see if oak tree presence appears to be correlated with building damage. Just north of the Las Flores Debris Basin, for example, we find a line of undamaged houses adjacent to  a cluster of oak trees.  Several other areas show the same pattern. 

We might want to see if there’s a statistically significant positive correlation between no damage and oak tree presence. Because these patterns are occurring at the parcel and sub-parcel level, however, such an analysis would require data at a spatial resolution well below that of the block group, which we were not able to obtain for this project.