How are California wildfires named? ‘Lightning plan’ led to number system

2-2. 2-7. 6-5.

Those are the names of some of the wildfires that ignited in Northern California on Tuesday.

The names aren’t exactly catchy. In our newsroom, producers used a whiteboard Tuesday to keep track as the new fires popped up in parts of Calaveras, Tuolumne, Stanislaus and Sacramento counties.

How did Cal Fire decide on these names? Jesse Torres, a battalion chief of communications for Cal Fire, explained that the common theme for all of those fires was lightning.

More than 10,500 lightning strikes were recorded within a 24-hour span, he said. Within Cal Fire’s southern region, 21 lightning-caused fires happened on state land. Another 16 lightning-caused fires occurred on federal land.

Years ago, Cal Fire came up with a strategy for managing fires when a forecast from the Nat