10 July 2017 — 0740 mdt

Why isn’t there a forestfire.gov website?

The smoke plume below was rising from the west-southwest when I returned home yesterday. When I tried to find the fire’s location, all I could find on the internet was a story in the Flathead Beacon about a fire west of Kalispell, located between Loon Lake and Rogers Mountain. The Beacon had a map. Later, a Facebook friend reminded me that fire information is available at https://inciweb.nwcg.gov.

Every summer, I need to relearn that URL because the name is so anti-intuitive. There should be a forestfire.gov website, but for the bureaucrats in charge that kind of clarity in a website’s name probably is frowned upon as an amateurish display of candor and clarity.

As for the fire producing the smoke I saw, InciWeb is no help. As of the time of this post, it listed only the July Fire in eastern Montana.