Blazing Statistics

[#1]

Last October there were more than 170 fires that burned over 245,000 acres in Northern California alone. According to The Sacramento Bee, Cal Fire has alleged that trees around power lines sparked three wildfires in Butte and Nevada Counties in October. These fires destroyed 60 structures, burned close to 1,000 acres of land and caused many residents to evacuate their homes.

What are the main causes of Wildfires? And how can I make sure I keep my home and family safe?

To help answer these questions I used SAS^® Visual Analytics to perform data discovery on wildfire data downloaded from the United States Department of Agriculture.  This data contains data on wildfires that have occurred in the United States from 1992 to 2015.  It contains 1.88 million wildfire records that occurred over 24 years and have burned approximately 140 million acres.

Check out the full story here. 

Data provided by:
Short, Karen C. 2017. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2015 [FPA_FOD_20170508]. 4th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.4

[ballardw]

Not that I have time to do it and do not have access to VA to approach in the same vane I would be tempted to look at acres of burns as a percentage of forest lands.

And any time I see a category like "Miscellaneous" as one of the larger categories in a histogram I start wondering about data collection, entry and coding issues.

[MelCar]

Thank you for your comment! That would be an interesting perspective.... I am going to play around with that thought. I'll probably have to find another data source to include so I can get the total area of forest land by state or county.  I also wanted to thank you for your comment about the high value for Miscellaneous.  It is something definitely worth mentioning.  I know that the person/organization that pulled the data together was pulling it from Federal, State and Local data. So perhaps there were many that weren't classified. 

Thanks again for your comments!

Melanie