Gridley, CA
How exposed is Gridley to wildfire?
Gridley sits at the 88th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 2,933 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 Gridley at the 89th percentile, close to its 88th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 83.4% of Gridley's 2,933 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 7% Direct and 9.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Gridley compares
Gridley's 88th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 56th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 31 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gridley ranks 3,869 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,538 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 689 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Because Gridley is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Gridley's 83.4% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gridley's 3,869-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Gridley, see the exposure-zones guide.