Buena Vista, CA
How exposed is Buena Vista to wildfire?
USFS scores Buena Vista at the 94th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 289 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Buena Vista at the 95th percentile, close to its 94th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Indirect exposure is dominant in Buena Vista (57.1% of 289 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 42.9% sit in the Direct zone.
Buena Vista against the rest of the country
Inside California, Buena Vista sits at just the 72nd percentile even though it scores 94th 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, Buena Vista ranks 1,816 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,933 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 442 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Buena Vista and the insurance market
Because Buena Vista is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 57.1% of Buena Vista's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Buena Vista's 94th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Buena Vista, see the exposure-zones guide.