East Palo Alto, CA
How exposed is East Palo Alto to wildfire?
East Palo Alto sits at the 47th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,564 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts East Palo Alto at the 48th percentile, close to its 47th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
99.3% of East Palo Alto's 5,564 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 0.7% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 5,564 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How East Palo Alto compares
Inside California, East Palo Alto sits at just the 9th percentile even though it scores 47th 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, East Palo Alto ranks 16,818 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,098 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,434 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
East Palo Alto and the insurance market
East Palo Alto's 47th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 99.3% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, East Palo Alto 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind East Palo Alto's 16,818-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond East Palo Alto, see the exposure-zones guide.