El Segundo, CA
El Segundo wildfire risk explained
USFS scores El Segundo at the 11th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 7,094 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 El Segundo at the 16th percentile, close to its 11th-percentile risk score.
Where El Segundo's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 99.8% of El Segundo's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.2% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,094 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How El Segundo compares
There's little gap between El Segundo's 11th national percentile and its 1st percentile inside California, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, El Segundo ranks 27,945 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,418 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,560 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
El Segundo and the insurance market
El Segundo's 11th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
El Segundo's 99.8% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where El Segundo's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,094 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for El Segundo. The exposure-zones guide covers what El Segundo's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.