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James A. Woods - Hazard Geographer
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“I have always loved maps,“ says James Woods, currently a freelance geographer doing consulting work, “But I didn't get involved in geography until the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980.” Back then, as an undergraduate, Woods was a music major trying to find his direction in life. His brother had just graduated with a degree in architecture and had multiple job offers already lined up. That same spring, Mount St. Helens blew up, and Woods like many others, followed the news coverage closely. “After the eruption, I remember watching all the news and trying to look up on the map where it was and what areas were hit,” says Woods. This convinced Woods to switch majors to geography. Woods now holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in geography and while he is currently working as a consultant, he has worked multiple jobs all closely related to the environment. While with Los Angeles County, Woods worked for the Environmental Programs Division of the Department of Public Works on their Urban Storm Water Run-off program. Woods has also worked for the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (OES), where he worked amidst the results of natural disasters everyday. “OES deals with disasters and physical geography – brush fires, forest fires, floods, earthquakes, rain, storms, freezes, El Niño, and La Niña,” says Woods, “OES is also responsible for mapping the various disasters that impact the people of California.” Woods was involved in two major projects for OES this year. One project was to map and geocode every site that had been impacted by any disaster that has hit California. “We are currently dealing with disasters going back to the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989,” says Woods, “ The purpose of this project is to identify those sites that have been impacted the most by the disasters so that mitigation programs can be developed and evaluated.” The other project involved fieldwork. During the brush fires at Joshua Tree National Park this spring (May 1999), Woods was part of the GIS team that was sent to the Incident Command post to produce maps of the fire. A National Park team had gone up in a helicopter and mapped the perimeter with a GPS unit. The GIS team then took that data and produced various maps for briefings. Woods worked on the maps used by the post-fire rehabilitation team. Currently, Woods is working as a consultant doing a brush fire analysis study of the Santa Clarita Watershed in Los Angeles County. This grew out of his graduate studies. “I got involved with fire as an undergraduate,” says Woods, “ I noticed that during the fires of Yellowstone in 1988, that fire and geography are closely related.” “Almost all of the essential elements of geography are reflected in brush and forest fires,” continues Woods, “There is a social component (who is at risk and who is impacted now and in the future), there is a spatial component (what area was burned), and there is a temporal component (what has burned in the past and where it might burn in the future). “ One of the biggest challenges Woods faces is having to deal with various sources of data, and then trying to merge them all together. While working at OES, Woods received data from various state and federal agencies. “Each agency likes their own software platform and their own projection,” says Woods, “We use MapInfo, ArcView, and ArcInfo most commonly.” Now, as a consultant, Woods uses the internet to get data. Woods uses websites for state agencies (California's Department of Finances, http://www.dof.ca.gov), federal agencies (Federal Emergency Management Agency, http://www.fema.gov/), and private organizations (Center for International Earth Science Information Network, http://www.ciesin.org/). Although Woods gathers most of his data from the web, he is not afraid of a digitizer. “Most of the brush fire data I get is on paper maps so I have to get it in the old fashioned way-digitizing.” This has come in handy because he also teaches a class on data acquisition, input, and management as part of the GIS certificate program at California State University, Long Beach. James Woods is a geographer who takes his burning fascination about nature's power and uses it to teach and help people prepare for nature's wrath. |