"We Didn't Start The Fire!" A Hillside Fire in Anchorage

Here is a map of all the hydrants in Anchorage. This is the first and most important part of my model, finding places without public water supply.

This is a map of all the water hydrants in Anchorage with what is known as a "buffer". These are all the locations within 200 meters of a fire hydrant that can be served by a firetruck attached within two hose-lengths of the hydrant. You can see that the Hillside has many places running on wells. This is not conducive to fighting a wildfire in this region. While helicopters can reach it, and while fire trucks can access it, the lack of easy access to fire hydrants hinders a fast and effective response. Making this buffer helps me find the streets that I need to focus on the most. By using the erase by mask tool, I was able to erase the streets I didn't need to focus on. Some of the empty spaces on the Hillside are surrounding the three local schools: South High School, Service High, and Goldenview Middle School. In the middle of a fire, the Anchorage Fire Department would shuttle water from tankers to the firefighting apparatuses because it is easier to pump water from the relatively unencumbered six fire hydrants at each of the schools than to hook up to a hydrant that has never been used before, and may or may not work.

First off, lets focus on Aspect. Aspect is the direction that a slope faces, particularly in a cardinal direction such as North, South, East, or West. It also can face any degree of Northwest, Southeast, and all the other cardinal directions in between. Aspect is important for wildfire modeling because the slopes that tend to burn the most are found on the South, Southeast, and Southwest. This is due to the sun having more time to dry up vegetation on the south facing slopes and cause a fire. In this map, I managed to take the three southern aspects, and combine them into one. They are the yellow slopes. The blue slopes are all other slopes.

So now we use the Raster Calculator to combine the Slope and the Aspect model we have just made above. We will put the slope at 45 degrees and above, and the Aspect for the Southern directions.

We can now see the vulnerable, too steep of grade roads, the butternut locations of less danger, with the purple indicating an increased risk, (slope and aspect) facing south, and a 3 or turquoise blue showing the steepest slopes (sheer 90 degrees, of which there is none) facing south. We now have a basic, landcover-less model for modeling wildfire risk on the Hillside in Anchorage, Alaska.

Policy Recommendation:

Build a secondary access road in front of Fire Station #10. Put gates on it, like the ones that barricade JBER, the local military base in the area, so that people can't use it unless there is a severe emergency. This would be done so that the residents who oppose said road do not have people driving all night long at inappropriate hours.