Bell Gardens, CA
How exposed is Bell Gardens to wildfire?
USFS scores Bell Gardens at the 43rd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 8,791 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Bell Gardens's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 48th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Bell Gardens's buildings (99.8% of 8,791) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 8,791 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Bell Gardens against the rest of the country
Inside California, Bell Gardens sits at just the 7th percentile even though it scores 43rd nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bell Gardens ranks 18,078 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,899 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,465 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Bell Gardens
Bell Gardens sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 43rd-percentile score like Bell Gardens's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
With 99.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Bell Gardens gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Bell Gardens's 43rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bell Gardens, see the exposure-zones guide.