A modest proposal to make fire names memorable

Does the hurricane industry have more organizational structure than the wildfire industry?

Are they even industries?

Organizational structure is the only reason I can come up with concerning my biggest question about fires. Not how they start, how they spread, why they seem worse every year or who's to blame.

I want to know why the naming convention for fires is so strange.

Quick: What was the name of the massive fire last fall that burned thousands of structures in Sonoma County? Or the Oakland Hills fire in 1991 that killed 25 people? How about the one earlier this month in Shasta County?

My guess is you don't know the official name of at least two of them. (Answers: Sonoma had the Tubbs Fire and the Nuns Fire; the Oakland Hills fire was officially called the Tunnel Fire and the Shasta County fire was the Carr Fire. If you got the latter, it's probably because it was coincidentally started by a car).

Now, what was the name of the hurricane that wiped out New Orleans in 2005? Hurricane Katrina!

You remember because hurricanes have a cool naming convention (first names, going through the alphabet in order) and fires are named after an often-obscure region or landmark near where they start.

The Tubbs Fire got its name because it started near Tubbs Lane. The Tunnel Fire was near Tunnel Road. The Nuns Fire and Carr Fire were named after the people who started them. (That's not true, but we don't know it intuitively, because wildfires are apparently named by a cartographer who finds the most obscure area or road nearby and makes the name official.)

I have a modest proposal: Let each state create a similar naming convention for wildfires to the National Hurricane Center's policy for hurricanes.

With a twist: Instead of people's names, we use musical acts.

Granted, it won't make the fires any better (and to be clear, I'm not minimizing the impact of the fires. No need to repeat my 2014 Flight 370 debacle), but it will make them easier to remember.

You start with the ABBA Fire and continue through the alphabet. The Bachman-Turner Overdrive Fire, the Cab Calloway Fire, the Dr. Dre Fire . . . all the way through the Ziggy Marley Fire. Then you start again.

There are so many musical artists whose names start with each letter that you won't run out, even though we average nearly 5,000 wildfires per year in California. If you combine solo artists and bands, you've got enough to cover any year.

What's the benefit? Awareness and a shared language.

When we talk about major events, we need an immediate way to identify them. World War I was called "the war to end all wars," "the great war" "the war of nations" and more. Finally (presumably after the launch of the sequel), it became World War I. So when you talk about it,  you don't have to say, "you know, the great war. The one that ran from 1914 to 1918 in Europe. Remember that?"

That's how we describe wildfires: the general area, how big it was, when it happened and how destructive.

The Mendocino Complex Fire? How about the Manfred Mann Fire?

The 2015 Valley Fire? How about the Van Halen Fire?

The 2012 Rush Fire in Lassen County? Well . . . that one can keep its name. It's a fire-naming miracle: A blaze named after a group that's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

We just need to recognize that one band should be left out: The name Chicago Fire is already taken by the conflagration started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow. But the rest? Let's make them easier to remember.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.