Fort Bidwell, CA
How exposed is Fort Bidwell to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Fort Bidwell lands at the 96th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 244 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Fort Bidwell at the 96th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Fort Bidwell's 244 counted buildings, 99.6% 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 Fort Bidwell compares
Fort Bidwell's 96th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 75th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 20 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Fort Bidwell ranks 1,376 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 23,324 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 389 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Fort Bidwell and the insurance market
Fort Bidwell's 96th-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
Fort Bidwell's 99.6% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Fort Bidwell's 96th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Fort Bidwell, see the exposure-zones guide.