Why 20 Different Wildfires Can Share One Name

In August 2020, lightning storms swept across five San Francisco Bay Area counties and started 20 separate wildfires within days of each other. Cal Fire didn’t stand up 20 separate incident commands. It folded all 20 into a single name — the SCU Lightning Complex — and fought them as one operation stretching across San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties.

That word, “complex,” shows up constantly in wildfire coverage and rarely gets explained. According to the U.S. Forest Service, a complex is two or more individual incidents located in the same general area which are assigned to a single incident commander or unified command. It isn’t a bigger fire. It’s an administrative decision about how many fires one team fights at once.

How a Fire Gets Its Name in the First Place

Before any complex forms, each individual fire needs its own name, and that part of the process has almost nothing to do with drama. Most often, the initial-attack incident commander or the 911 dispatcher names the blaze after the nearest geographic feature: a road, a canyon, a lake, a mountain. If a fire starts near a place called Green Lake, according to wildfire-data firm RedZone, it typically becomes the “Lake Fire” or the “Green Fire” — whichever hasn’t already been used that calendar year.

When a name is already taken, dispatchers get more specific or start numbering. Border 32, a large 2014 fire in southern San Diego County, wasn’t named for a person or a landmark; it was simply the 32nd fire that year to ignite along the U.S.-Mexico border and need the “Border” designation. RedZone’s database of fire names going back to 1900 turns up plenty of the ordinary — Cottonwood, Bear and Canyon top the list nationally — and a handful of the unintentionally funny, including Nevada’s Izzenhood and Poodle fires and Wyoming’s Carrot Fire.

Why Bundle Fires Together at All

Complexes exist for two practical reasons: coordination and money. Fighting 20 fires as 20 separate incidents means 20 separate command structures, 20 separate resource requests and 20 separate paper trails for federal reimbursement. Bundling them under one incident commander lets crews and aircraft move between the individual fires without waiting on a new authorization each time.

A complex takes its name from whichever fire inside it is the most active — the one burning hottest or demanding the most resources — not necessarily the first one reported. The 2018 Mendocino Complex, for years the largest wildfire in California history, was built from just two fires: the Ranch Fire and the River Fire. The SCU Lightning Complex, by contrast, absorbed 20.

What “Complex” Doesn’t Tell You

The label says nothing about size or danger. A complex of two large, fast-moving fires can be far more destructive than a complex of a dozen small, contained ones — the name only describes the org chart, not the fire itself. That distinction matters for anyone trying to gauge risk from a headline alone: a “complex” evacuation order could mean one significant blaze or several minor ones being managed together.

It also affects how the public tracks a fire once it has a complex name attached. InciWeb and state dashboards typically report acreage and containment for the complex as a whole, not for each ignition inside it, so a resident checking on a specific canyon or ridge sometimes has to dig past the top-line number to find the status of the fire nearest to them. Fire agencies say the tradeoff is worth it: a unified command can shift air tankers and hand crews to whichever piece of the complex is growing fastest that hour, something 20 separate incident commanders coordinating by radio could rarely manage as quickly.

Complexes can also be broken back apart. If one fire inside a complex keeps burning long after the others are contained, it is sometimes split off and given, or given back, its own individual name and incident command — the reverse of how it was folded in.

Daybreak Wire has covered the naming conventions behind other wildfire terminology, including the surprisingly strict rules for naming a single wildfire, and the parallel system the National Weather Service uses, or more precisely refuses to use, for naming winter storms.

Unlike Atlantic hurricanes, whose names get formally retired after a storm turns catastrophic, wildfire names are reused freely from one place to the next. Nothing stops another Bear Fire, another Lake Fire, or even another Carrot Fire from igniting next season, complex or not.