Eureka, CA
Eureka wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Eureka at the 47th national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 12,010 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Eureka at the 50th percentile, close to its 47th-percentile risk score.
Where Eureka's buildings actually sit
Only 5.3% of Eureka's 12,010 buildings carry Direct exposure and 32.1% carry Indirect; the remaining 62.7% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 12,010 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Eureka ranks
Inside California, Eureka 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, Eureka ranks 16,754 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,300 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,431 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Eureka
Eureka 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 47th-percentile score like Eureka's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Eureka's 62.7% 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 Eureka's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Eureka's 16,754-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Eureka's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.