Boones Creek. Big Sky. Green Post. These are just a few of the names that firefighters have given fires currently burning across the Lone Star State. But have you ever wondered who gives the fires their names?
As it turns out, naming a wildfire in Texas is nothing like hurricanes, which get their names from a pre-approved set chosen years in advance, alphabetically in order of date. No, it's actually a much more mundane naming system, in fact.
According to the Texas A&M Forest Service, fires are named by first responders who get to the scene and pick out a landmark nearby or a particular geographical location.
There are a few exceptions to this rule in regions across the state. One of those, East Texas, is one place where only fires of a certain size are named this way. The rule, according to the Forest Service, is that only grass-fueled fires larger than 100 acres and timber-fueled fires larger than 300 acres are given a name. Any fire smaller than that is given an auto-generated number, along with the name of the county it started in. For example, crews are currently working to extinguish a fire named Panola 2727 that's burned a half acre in, you guessed it, Panola County.
Recent weeks have seen an uptick in wildfires, with 164 counties in Texas under a burn ban currently. It's all due to the drought conditions, which have worsened in the past six weeks.
In fact, the National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag warning during the past several days because of the increased threat of wildfires due to hot and breezy conditions that could make the drought even worse in areas near and West of Interstate 35, here in North Texas.
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