Kyron Beaton's Blog

From the most destructive fires to have ever been recorded in British Columbia, seven have happened within the past decade. From the data shown in the above chart, three of the top ten fires occurred in 2017 alone, two of which were recorded on the exact same day. To put this into perspective, the data which was analyzed was recorded over a period of seven decades. Three out of the ten largest wildfires to have ever been recorded in British Columbia from this massive timespan of seventy years happened in just one year. There have been multiple different insights as to why our fires in the province of B.C. have been so destructive in recent times, and the reason is rapid climate change, which has led to hotter, drier conditions in the summer months. In fact, in the summer of this year, there was the notorious case of Lytton, which went so far as to  make international headlines in the U.S.  for its heat record of a whopping 49.5 degrees Celsius. What has happened within modern ...

Chart   Unanswered Question My unanswered question regarding this data is in what way were the human-caused fires created? The reason why my data fails to answer that question is because there's only three categories for the fire causes: Lightning, Person, and Other. How Would you Get the Data? By sending an FOI request to the BC Wildfire Service "Compliance and Enforcement" detachment  for a raw count of their historical fire investigation results, I would be able to aggregate this data in order to answer the question. However, there is a problem with doing this. If I were to request for data from 1950 on suspicious fire reports, it may not even be obtainable in the first place because that time period was so long ago, and for that reason, the data may not exist. As well, the sheer count of all the reports I would get has the potential to be staggering. Therefore, what I could do to mitigate this issue is to ask for a timeframe of when reports were filed, such as from 19...

A mother bear and her three cubs are spotted near the intersection of Hornby Street and Georgeson Avenue, walking down Hornby to assumingly forage for left-out garbage. Photo taken on October 12th, 2021, by Kyron Beaton. The three cubs arrived in front of a residency twenty minutes later on Savary Avenue, their mother not too far from them. Photo taken on October 12th, 2021, by Kyron Beaton. The sow and her cubs make their way towards a forest just at the end of Savary Avenue, appearing outside of yet another residency. Photo taken on October 12th, 2021, by Kyron Beaton. The forest at the end of Savary Avenue, frequently used by both wildlife and humans, where the family of bears had went in the direction of in order to avoid being in the sights of terrified residents. Photo taken on November 3rd, 2021, by Kyron Beaton. The Coquitlam River, which is just a little further into the forest, is currently in the midst of a salmon run, and was assumingly where the bears then went to in order...

Kyron Beaton Journalism Student Kwantlen Polytechnic University 12666 72nd Avenue Surrey, B.C. V7M 3H9 October 28, 2021 Jacqualine Griggs Kamloops Fire Center B.C. Wildfire Services Airport Rd. Kamloops, B.C. V2B 7X2 Dear Ms. Griggs, Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following: In electronic database format, from the years 2000 to 2021, within Zones K2 through K7, a raw count of suspicious fire reports that escalated to a police investigation. I request that the data collected is put into an electronic worksheet format (i.e.: .xmlx, .cml, .csv). The reason for this is so that I am able to more easily work with the raw data for my research. Please refer to my email and phone number below for further contact. Thank you for your time in reading this email, and I look forward to hearing back from you. Sincerely, Kyron Beaton 778-835-3271 kyronbeaton@gmail.com FOI Explanation:  According to my raw data I collected from my data analysis class, there were 2...

     Lead      Seven out of ten of the largest recorded British Columbian fires from 1950 to 2020 occurred within the past decade, with 2017 having the largest of fires in terms of Hectares burned, according to B.C. Wildfire Services. Excel Workbook Link and Explanation      From the link to the modified data sheet found here , you will see on the first worksheet all of the raw data collected, organized by size from largest to smallest. The second worksheet contains the top ten fires from the raw files, listing the years of the fire, the causes, and the sizes of each fire in Hectares.     I had also decided to follow Chad's advice on delving deeper into the data I found, and I had managed to decipher the definitions behind the different zones and fire centers as they related to the data, as well as what was causing the majority of fires. I had also listened to his advice about asking the question of whether or not fire rates had gon...

1. What dataset will you use for your final report?. My dataset I will be working with for my final report will be for a  historical report  for the various fire occurrences in British Columbia. The title is called "Fire Incident Locations - Historical", and is from the B.C. Government website. The link to the dataset is provided here . 2. Describe the dataset. What kind of data does it contain? The data included in the folder includes the years of which the fires took place, the sizes of the fires in hectares, the individual locations of each fire as shown by latitude and longitude, and the causes of each fire. I can assume that Ign_Date (Category C) represents the specific time when the fire takes place. For example, Fire K61192 has 20030821121200 as its number in Category C. When this number is separated by date and time, it can be simplified to 2003/08/21, 12:12. The Fire Label (Category E) is simply a combination of the fire's year followed by its number. 3. Is ...