I have more detail for the BLM admin organization. I'm going to post maps for each state office. For a refresher here is how line officer delegation works in the BLM.
BLM Director - Washington Office
State Office Director (12 of those)
District Manager, includes National Monument Managers for the larger NM's
Field Office Manager, can indlude the smaller National Monuments and things like National Conservation Areas
Field Stataion Manager or Staff Supervisor (Supervisor is not a line officer)
Field Stations are established mostly due to distance, workload and resources. Example, the Arctic District in Alaska (Fairbanks) has a field station in Nome. The Utah Color Country District, Cedar City Field Office has a field station in Hanksville called the Henry Mountain Field Station. It is located in one of the most wonderfully remote areas in the lower 48 states so it takes a lot of time to get there from Cedar City.
At all levels there are staff branches. Those include Fire and Aviation; Range Management (grazing); Recreation and Visitor Services; Lands, Realty, Surveying: Archaeology; and National Conservation Lands.
Now for radio callsigns,
Staff.
1641 The one refers to the district, the six refers to the field office, the four refers to the branch and the one refers to the person, with the lower the number the higher the rank. In this example 1641 would be supervised by 1640. In this example 1 is the Central California District (El Dorado Hills, CA), 6 is the Bakersfield Field Office (Bakersfield), 4 is Recreation and Visitor Services, and 1 is the person just below the branch supervisor.
Fire Apparatus.
WY-HDD 1603. WY refers to the state office using standard postal service abbreviations. HDD refers to the BLM District within Wyoming. The 1 refers to district number. The 6 is the engine type, with wildland engines being Types 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 (7's are patrol engines). Here is the photo of this engine.
View attachment 75258
This standard of numbering started about around 2012, give or take a year or two. Engines already given a number were not required to be renumbered and new lettering/numbering put on the engine. Depending on use, engines in the federal wildland fire managment agencies are replaced at 10 or greater intervals. This numbering scheme will be used on all new engines after the 2012 standarization. The three letter designator is from the U.S. fire/emergency services designator list. I will post a link to that in a post below.
Here is another from Arizona,
View attachment 75260
In this case this engine is stationed on the Colorado River District in Arizona (district #3) and is a Type 6 engine. I'm not sure what the next 6 refers to. In some states that is the field office #, but the Colorado River District only has 3 field offices (Kingman, Lake Havasu and Yuma) so 6 doesn't fit that. The 5 is the individual engine. Some districts have station numbers, which are located some distance from the district office and can have one or more engines. Sometimes I think the third number is a station number. I can't get on the WildCad page this morning to check on engines in other states, so I don't know.
I like this system as on large fires you can tell where resources have come from. I haven't shown anything from California, because they established a standard within that state in the early 1980's when dad was still working. They didn't know that 3 letter designators would come to each state so they start everything with a 3. Three is the number of the state office in the BLM's 12 state offices. The second number in CA is the district #, the third number is the Engine Type where they lumped anything below a Type 3 into the number 4 and the last number is the individual engine number. They lumped as they only had Type 3 and Type 6 engines at the time.
Thanks to dad for writing this, I just proof read it. He reminds us that civil engineers went on fires in "the olden days" of the Forest Service.,1949-1987 in his case. Pretty good computer work for someone born in 1927, huh?
EDIT** As you can see it's pretty hard to figure out how BLM personnel and appartus are from without knowing the district level. This is why dad seems so adament about making sure the district's are shown in the RR DB. He wonders why the DB federal pages in California have the districts listed, but not in many other states.
