Butte Meadows, CA
Butte Meadows wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Butte Meadows at the 100th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 138 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Butte Meadows at the 100th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Butte Meadows's buildings actually sit
Of Butte Meadows's 138 counted buildings, 100% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Butte Meadows compares
Butte Meadows scores 100th nationally and 95th within California — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Butte Meadows ranks 118 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,355 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 75 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Butte Meadows 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 100th-percentile score like Butte Meadows's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because Direct exposure dominates in Butte Meadows (100%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
Where Butte Meadows's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Butte Meadows's 118-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Butte Meadows's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.