Garden Grove, CA
Garden Grove wildfire risk explained
Garden Grove sits at the 59th 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 39,543 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 Garden Grove at the 66th percentile, close to its 59th-percentile risk score.
Where Garden Grove's buildings actually sit
Most of Garden Grove's buildings (99.5% of 39,543) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 39,543 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Garden Grove compares
Garden Grove's 59th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 17th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 42 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Garden Grove ranks 12,849 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 247 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,298 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Garden Grove and the insurance market
Garden Grove's 59th-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.
Hardening a home in Garden Grove
Even with 99.5% of Garden Grove outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
Where Garden Grove's figures come from
Garden Grove's 59th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Garden Grove's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.