Wildfire Risk to California Communities
We assessed wildfire risk to homes and communities in California as part of a larger assessment of wildfire hazard across the state. In July 2019 the Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service contracted with Pyrologix to conduct a spatial wildfire hazard assessment across all land ownerships. This summary of wildfire risk to California communities is the third and final part of the larger wildfire hazard assessment.
The concept of summarizing wildfire risk to housing units within a set of pre-defined communities is well-established. In 2018, Pyrologix produced a report titled “Exposure of human communities to wildfire in the Pacific Northwest” for the Pacific Northwest Region of the U.S. Forest Service(1) . That report identified the most at-risk communities in terms of 1) the mean risk to all housing units in a community, and 2) the cumulative risk within the community, which increases with community size (population). Following that analysis, the Wildfire Risk to Communities(2) project was established by the U.S. Forest Service; it produced a nationwide summary of wildfire risk to communities by generating nationally consistent web maps, summary statistics, downloadable spatial data and tables, and more for the conterminous U.S., Alaska, and Hawaii.
