During the Camp fire in November 2018, I began to wonder exactly how wildfires get their names. That blaze turned into the deadliest in California history, devastating the town of Paradise in Butte County — but the fire’s name conjured images of grinning children around a bonfire.
This week, my colleagues Corina Knoll and Kate Selig got to the bottom of the naming mystery.
“Naming wildfires has for decades been a way to streamline communication, direct resources and inform the public. In California alone, the list of active wildfires is long and colorful: The Cow fire. The Royal fire. The Pay fire. The French fire,” they write. “Seemingly random or playful to those unfamiliar with an area, they belie a dull truth. That is, fire names are typically a literal and boring reference to a geographic location.”
The names come from whatever the first fire official on the scene sees nearby, whether a street, mountain or body of water. These decisions are made rapidly, in the rush of an emergency.
The Camp fire was named after Camp Creek Road. The 2017 Nuns fire after Nuns Canyon Road. The 2007 Witch fire for Witch Creek.
This naming convention is far different from the methodical way that hurricanes and tropical storms are christened. The names of Atlantic tropical storms have been taken from alphabetical lists of men’s and women’s names since 1953. There are separate lists of names for Pacific storms. And the lists are recycled every six years.
So the second Atlantic storm of 2024 was destined to be Beryl decades before it hit Houston as a hurricane this week, leaving widespread power outages in its wake. And there was a Beryl in 2018, and in 2012.
Remember Hurricane Hilary, the unusual storm that brought floods to Southern California last summer? The eighth tropical storm to form in the eastern portion of the northern Pacific (the part nearest to California) in 2029 will be named Hilary.
Beryl is scheduled to be used again in 2030, unless officials choose to retire it. A name can be dropped from the rotation “if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name for a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Retired names include Katrina, Sandy, Ian and Ida.
But back to wildfires. There are tens of thousands that need to be named each year, unlike hurricanes, of which there are usually just a few dozen. In California alone, there have already been 3,579 wildfires this year.
So their names are often left to the discretion of the responding agencies. That’s how we ended up with a Not Creative fire in Idaho in 2015; a Dad fire that started on Father’s Day in 2012; and, much to the chagrin of local residents, a fire that same year in Utah that was called the Dump fire, because, yes, it started near a trash dump.
And before you go, some good news
The inaugural class of the American Climate Corps was sworn in this summer in a ceremony at the White House. Members posed for pictures with President Biden before embarking on missions to help communities across the country become more environmentally sustainable.
The Los Angeles Times interviewed four people in the corps working around California, which has felt the effects of climate issues particularly brutally this summer.
Members of the corps say they gain valuable professional experience and a sense of hope for the future of the climate. “This is a way of life,” said Michelle Carranza, who has been helping to install solar panels near Sacramento. “We really do feel like we’re making a difference.”