An aside: how are fires named?

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Family wedding all weekend. Busted.

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Last week a feriend asked via text if I knew how fires were named. I answered with a guess that it had something to do with the name of the location where the fire is first spotted. I decided to take this simple question to relaunch the blogging effort after a missed weekend.

According to this interview with Tom Lavagnino, a fire information officer from California, fires are named by the firest agency to spot them, and usually are identified by the nearest geographic feature. This doesn't mean that the naming is accurate. What becomes more important over time is that the identifier is consistent across agencies than the actual closest geographic landmark.

When fires merge they become complexes and are renamed. This is a reequirement of how fires are fought. Two separate fires with their own names are fought by different ncident command systems. If the fires become physically close enough that they cannot be managed separately they become a complex. The separate entites that fought the fires then merge into a singe command structure.

That's the answer. Nothing so fancy or ordered as the naming of hurricanes and tropical storms. I might look at how other countries name their fires later on.