Local // Bay Area & State

Why did they call it the Carr Fire? Explaining the names behind the flames

Coming up with a name: It's an act we usually associate with those things that are precious to us. Pets, children, significant places. But when it comes to disasters, a name happens with only the thought of practicality.

When you name a wildfire, you have at most a few minutes.

The names that have become part of California’s annals of tragedy — Tubbs, Nuns, and now Carr and Ferguson — were christened in the midst of chaos. Firefighters have to call the new one something, fast, so everyone gets coordinated as the conflagration spreads. And fires almost always spread quickly.

Atlantic hurricanes are assigned titles alphabetically off a list of male and female names used on a six-year rotation. But wildfires, which can sprawl over hundreds of thousands of acres, are typically named after the area where they start. The moniker could be the nearest road, a local landmark or a geographical marker, like a mountain or lake.

Most often, the dispatch center that sends the first responders to a wildland fire designates the name, but the first on-scene engine or fire official can also name the incident, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

Time is of the essence. Responding agencies use the name to locate a fire, track it and steer resources to it. And for the public, it’s handy to have a hashtag for quick research on the web.

National Park Service officials tend to designate fires based on geographical points, and Cal Fire generally dubs them after roads. In 1991, the deadly Oakland Hills firestorm got called the Tunnel Fire because it started near the Caldecott Tunnel.

The sun sets over an area affected by the Carr Fire, which had burned more than 160,000 acres by Sunday.
Photo: Mark Ralston / AFP / Getty Images

Increasingly, though, because many of these location names have historical roots, devastating fires end up with real people’s names — often becoming the most recognized association with a long-gone pioneer or perhaps a significant incident. And those people are rarely in a position to object.

Five of the state’s 10 most destructive wildfires ever have occurred in just the past five years — and among them, at number six, is the Carr Fire near Redding. It started July 23 and was still only 43 percent contained by Sunday evening, at which time it had burned 160,049 acres, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed seven people.

The fire broke out near Highway 299 and Carr Powerhouse Road, which is named after Judge Francis C. Carr, a prominent figure in the creation of the federal Central Valley Project, which influenced water management in California for decades to come.

The son of an Irish immigrant, Judge Carr was a well-respected water rights attorney in the law firm of Carr and Kennedy and an early influence in what would become California’s water distribution system.

The Judge Francis Carr Powerplant, a hydropower facility near Whiskeytown Lake, bears his name, along with the road where a car had a mechanical malfunction that sparked what became the currently massive inferno.

The Carrs, who for generations have lived in Shasta County, never expected the family name to be associated with such a destructive force, said Patrick Carr, Judge Francis’ grandson.

“The family is very proud of what our forebears have done in this county,” said Carr, 74, speaking from his home in Cottonwood, just south of Redding and to date a relatively safe distance from the fire. “We’ve been here since the 1870s and the Carr name, as far as we’re concerned, is all about public service, not about destroying things. So you have to back away and say, ‘You know what? It’s OK.’

“It just happened to be a name that was attached to this great tragedy.”

The Tubbs Fire, the state’s most destructive and part of the deadliest series of fires in California history, started on Oct. 8 of last year near Highway 128 and Tubbs Lane in Calistoga. The conflagration on its own consumed 5,636 structures and killed 24 people.

Several significant areas in Calistoga are named after Alfred Tubbs, who came to California during the Gold Rush and made his fortune in San Francisco. He eventually became a state senator and helped found the San Francisco Fire Department, which more than a century later sent men and women to combat the devastating blaze in Sonoma County that bears his name.

The Ferguson Fire — which has bedeviled the Yosemite National Park area for weeks, forcing the indefinite closure of its famous valley — broke out near Ferguson Ridge Road in the Mariposa area. That road was named for the ridge, which is 3,800 feet high, and the ridge was doubtless named for someone named Ferguson, who remained unidentified at press time. A prominent Mariposa County miner, Col. Samuel Benjamin Ferguson, died in 1913 at the age of 79, according to an obituary in the Mariposa Gazette, but it was not immediately known if the ridge’s namesake and the colonel are one and the same.

The Nuns Fire, another of last year’s Wine Country fires, started about a half mile northeast of Highway 12 in Glen Ellen on Nuns Canyon Road. And because of a mistake made decades ago, the Nuns Fire is technically misspelled.

Nuns Canyon Road was named after Hugh Nunn, a Scottish immigrant who built a homestead in the area in the mid-1850s. But the people who named the canyon left out the second “n” — apparently being in as much of a hurry as the firefighters who would descend on the same scene more than a century later.

It’s impossible to say what the fires’ namesakes would think of being associated with the destruction seen in recent years, but Patrick Carr suspects the name would be “small potatoes” compared to finding an answer on how to prevent such disasters.

“For a native son who never had a college degree and wound up as a rather profoundly highly respected attorney, he was about doing the right thing for the right reasons,” Carr said. “He would be horrified by this conflagration and probably seeking to find answers and ask questions to preclude these kinds of things from happening again.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the manner in which names are given to cyclones, which is the same as hurricanes. Tornadoes are named for the small geographical area where they touch down. This story has been updated to reflect this change.

Chronicle staff writer Steve Rubenstein contributed to this report.
