Problems
Over the course of the project, I realized there were a variety of issues with preparing this hazard profile.
Water distance
The water bodies for the analysis were determined from the land use data. However, this only includes inland bodies of water. I had considered also including the blank spaces into the water bodies during the ASSIGN operation, but that would include regions bordering the northern edge of the study area, and would introduce non-existant features into the data, so in the end, I did not include the water in the ocean and inlets around Metro Vancouver. In the future, this could be added in if a dataset dedicated to water bodies was acquired and used.
Land use
The values assigned to each land use category are subjective, and adjusting the values would likely have major effects on the final MCE output. Determining the fire hazard for each land use could be a project in itself, due to the potential variety of structures and activities present within each land use category. Still, I feel that it is a necessary factor to be included in this analysis, but the determination of relative values needs additional work.
Fire halls
Finding the information for the fire halls was quite tedious, and I had to re-geocode the fire halls several times due to overlooking information, or finding additional information later while trying to verify the existing fire halls previously geocoded. As far as I can tell, a consolidated listing of fire halls in BC does not exist, which would have made the task of finding and geocoding the fire halls much simpler than researching each individual municipality to find information about its fire department and fire halls.
Distance and boundary concerns
The distance operations do not take into account strange geometries of the municipalities, and would have some effect on the MCE result. For example, any portion of land jutting out into the sea could only be accessed by travelling to the point on the mainland with which it is connected, yet the distance operators determine linear distance from the roads and fire halls. However, this could also be partially offset by the inclusion of water distance from the ocean, which does not currently exist in the analysis. The total effects of this concern could be determined in the future with more careful data preparation.