Cal Fire's names are sometimes correct, sometimes not

Tubbs, Nun, Norrbom and Partrick: It sounds like a law firm with dyslexia, but it's a partial list of the named fires that have grabbed headlines and ruined lives over the past weeks. But how do these names get chosen, and who chooses them?

It should come as no surprise that Cal Fire – the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection – usually names the fires, at least the ones that come into their area of management. Often, it's the dispatch center that sends the initial resources to a wildland fire, or 'the first on-scene engine or fire official can also name the incident,' according to a FAQ on the Cal Fire website (calfire.ca.gov).

'To be quite honest, I don't know the history of why we started naming fires,' said Battalion Chief Kirk Van Wormer during the waning days of the recent fire emergency. 'But it's common sense, it's a way to identify the fire and differentiate it from other incidents. We have to be able to identify the fire to make sure resources are assigned appropriately, and so on.'

As you might expect, fires are usually named for the area in which they start. So the Tubbs Fire, which swept across Highway 101 on Monday morning, Oct. 9, taking out entire neighborhoods in Fountaingrove and Coffey Park, was named for Tubbs Lane, where it originated 10 miles away as the crow flies. Tubbs is a back street in rural Calistoga that connects Highways 128 and 29, by way of the less-than-notorious Old Faithful Geyser.

Likewise, the Atlas Fire erupted on the flanks of Atlas Mountain northeast of Napa, and the Redwood Valley fire began in, you guessed it, Redwood Valley in Mendocino County.

But if there is some confusion over the names, it's not always Cal Fire's fault – though sometimes it is. Nuns Fire got its start on Nuns Canyon, or perhaps Nuns Canyon Road, which winds up north from Highway 12 near Glen Ellen. The irony here is that, as locals are fond of saying, there are no nuns in Nuns Canyon: it's named for homesteaders Hugh and Sarah Nunn, who arrived in the 1850s according to local historian Arthur Dawson. So if it's a simple spelling mistake, it's not Cal Fire's.

The same can't be said of the Norbbom Fire. Norrbom – two Rs, one B, not the other way around – is a name well known in Sonoma, not least because Bob Norrbom is, ironically, a battalion chief with Sonoma Valley Fire and Rescue. The narrow road that winds up past the Veterans Memorial Building into the hills is Norrbom Road – spelled correctly – but how the fire ended up with the double-B is anybody's guess.

'That is unfortunate,' admitted Van Wormer. 'We in the Valley know how to spell it, but somebody outside the Valley may not know how to spell it. It's a simple oversight, but it does have implications, because the public sees it's misspelled and that creates some problems.'

Probably no one should care quite as much as Bob Norrbom, but he seemed to take it with equanimity, if not a sense of humor. 'I'm actually most bummed that the T-shirt vendor spelled my name wrong,' he said, referring to souvenir T-shirts for sale at the LNU complex staging area in Santa Rosa. 'It lists all the fires, but they spelled Norrbom wrong.'

Aside from that, there was some inevitable static on the scanners when Norrbom the battalion chief showed up to fight the Norbbom Fire. 'When the Cal Fire management team came in, and I started taking over control as branch director of the Nuns Fire, it caused some confusion with the team,' he said. 'They're like, 'No no, Norbbom's over here,' and we said, 'No, this is the person Norrbom that's on the Nuns.' They're like, 'What? He's got a fire named after him?''

Despite the difficulty in changing the name of the fire mid-emergency, Cal Fire managed to do just that, and after several days of the misspelling the fire was corrected to Norrbom on about Oct. 18.

Adding to the confusion, this year's Nuns Fire isn't the only Nuns Fire on record. In 1964 the Nuns Canyon Fire burned 7,000 acres, said Norrbom, who remembers watching his grandfather riding a fire truck to tackle that one. He also mentioned a 1923 Nuns Canyon Fire that burned into Glen Ellen, and sparked the creation of the Glen Ellen Fire Department – where his father has sat on the board since the 1970s. Evidently, these fires are related by more than name.

Then again there's the Partrick Fire – surely another typo, you think, it should be Patrick. Not so fast: there absolutely is a Partrick Road, which comes out of the Browns Valley community west of Napa and heads up Mount Veeder. So in this case, Cal Fire got it right, despite occasional errors of history and the thick fingers of a rushed dispatcher.

A complete list of ongoing fires is on the Cal Fire website at calfire.ca.gov/communications/communications_StatewideFireSummary.

It can make for entertaining reading.

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.