Wildfire risk in El Dorado County, California

About 81% of El Dorado County sits on land the US Forest Service rates high or very high for wildfire hazard. That is the 2nd-highest share of any county in the United States, out of 3,143. Around 191,700 people live there.

What the bands mean

The Forest Service scores every patch of land in the country for how likely it is to burn and how hard that fire would be to control. It is about the land, not about any one house. Think vegetation, terrain and how fire has behaved in that kind of country before.

More of it sits in the very high band than the high one — 44% against 38%. That is the part worth noticing. Plenty of counties carry a big high-hazard share with only a sliver rated very high. Here it is the other way round.

Only 6% falls in the moderate-to-very-low bands. There is not much middle ground here. The remaining 13% is water, rock or built-up ground that will not carry fire.

What it does not tell you

This is the part most sites skip, so here it is plainly.

• It is not a rating for a specific house. Two homes on the same street can sit in different bands, and neither figure accounts for the house itself.
• It does not know about your roof, your gutters or your clearance. Those change the outcome a great deal and none of them are in this data.
• It is not a forecast. Nothing here says a fire is coming this year. It describes the land as it was mapped in 2023.
• It says nothing about response. How close a station is, and how quickly crews can reach a road, are not part of the score.

If you are house hunting here

A high county-wide share does not mean every address is equal. It means the difference between one neighborhood and another is worth checking before you get attached to a listing. You can see the wildfire layer over El Dorado County and zoom into the specific area you are considering.

It is also worth asking your insurer early. Availability and pricing in high-hazard country have moved quickly in recent years, and that is a question with a concrete answer rather than a guess.

Where the numbers come from

US Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential, 2023 edition, added up across the 1,143,763 mapped acres in the county. Percentages are the share of those acres in each band. Population is the Census county figure.

We publish the county roll-up because it is a fair summary of a whole county. We would not publish it as an address-level answer, because it is not one — that is what the map is for, and even there we are describing land rather than any particular building. More on how we handle this layer is on the wildfire methodology page.

If you want to look at somewhere else, the wildfire layer covers the whole country.