Creating unique incident and fire identifiers

The Incident Number field is meant to uniquely identify an incident, but there are multiple issues with this field, particularly in the historical datasets. In some instances, incident numbers are incomplete or they are re-used from year to year, resulting in sitreps for multiple incidents being grouped together as a single incident. Splitting them based on year is problematic because some fires, particularly in the southeastern United States span the annual boundary or have a final report filed in the next year. There are also instances where Incident Name and point of origin are distinctly different but share the same incident number. Conversely, there are incidents in the current version that have the same incident number, but are split across multiple unique system identifiers. Finally, there are instances where fires are incorporated into a fire complex and the Incident Number changes to that of the fire complex. We solved these issues by creating two concatenated ID fields: the Fire Event ID and the Incident ID. The Fire Event ID is used to identify individual wildfires regardless of whether they are managed as part of a larger fire complex. The Incident Id is used to group all sitreps related to an incident response, clustering related situation reports that are related but may differ in terms of the Incident Number and or the Incident Name.