ANNOUNCEMENTS
This study aims to identify wildfire vulnerability zones in the Los Angeles County, California. Wildfire has always been a concern in California, and it is only growing bigger. It is a constant issue posing threat in Los Angeles County. It is imperative to learn about the factors that are associated with the wildfires so that better planning can be done to control wildfires and minimise all types of losses that occur due to wildfire. Another objective takes emergency response into account. It is crucial to have adequate resources and infrastructure to deal with the wildfire of any magnitude so that the response time can be reduced with the understanding of service capacity & proximity of fire stations and hospitals. To achieve the objective, Analytical Hierarchical Process has been used dealing with ten parameters which are factors affecting wildfires i.e., Rainfall, Land Cover, Slope, Aspect, elevation, temperature, wind, population, and roads.
The final output classifies the study area into 4 vulnerability zones (Low, Moderate, High and Very High-risk zones). For validation, MODIS Hotspots and California Fire Parameter (2017,2018,2020) have been used which matches with the output closely.
This study shows that Los Angeles County as approximately 2459.78 km sq. of the area at low risk, 3488.228 km sq. of area at moderate risk, 2596.16 km sq. at high risk and 2068.64 km sq. at very high risk, representing 23%, 33%, 24% and 20% respectively. 86.4 % of the validation fire points lie accurately in the areas characterized by high and very high risk.
Location allocation model suggests creation of 7 new Hospital facilities and 5 new fire stations for the better management and timely response.
