Wildfire terms 101: A ‘complex’ topic made simple

Branches, divisions, groups and complexes.

To many people, those firefighting buzzwords may as well be in a foreign language. To the chiefs in charge of putting out wildfires, they are important incident-management tools.

“It’s a way for us not to get overtaxed and manage rapidly growing incidents,” said Eric Sherwin, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Fire Department.

Take “complex,” for example. Sometimes separate fires with separate names burn close to each other. To fight them more effectively and efficiently, officials will have one team manage all those fires and call them a complex, such as the Freeway Complex in 2008. That started as two fires that merged into one and burned several hundred homes in Anaheim Hills and Yorba Linda. But the fires don’t have to collide to be called a complex, Sherwin said.

“In Northern California, when they have a couple of dozen lightning strikes (in the same area), they call it a complex,” he said.

A “group” is defined by its function, such as a number of fire engines assigned to rescues or preventing homes from burning.

“Branches” and “divisions” are geographical locations on a fire. People listening to firefighting frequencies on scanners hear references to “Division Alpha” or “Division Zulu.” When a division has too many “assets” to manage, Sherwin said, such as fire engines and hand crews, a new division is created and is named based on the next letter available in the alphabet. The 27th division in a big fire would be named Alpha Alpha.

Branches identified by Roman numerals are composed of those lettered divisions. In the 2016 Blue Cut fire, the Cajon Pass divided the branches, Sherwin said.

These separations chop big fires into small pieces that are easier to manage.

“Each person reports to only one person,” Sherwin said.