Why 517 US Places Have No Wildfire Score on This Site

A data-sparsity problem, not an oversight

Of the 32,038 Census places in USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities workbook, 517 carry USFS's own insufficient_data: Yes flag — every risk, burn-probability and exposure field is blank, and the recorded building count is zero. These are typically the smallest, most sparsely built places in the source data, where USFS's own model had nothing to compute against.

Why this site drops them instead of estimating

A page with a guessed risk score for a place USFS itself couldn't score would be less honest than no page at all. WildfireRiskFinder excludes these 517 places from its 31,521 community pages entirely, rather than showing a placeholder number dressed up as real data.

Risk and burn probability can diverge — that is not an error

Venice, LA illustrates a related point: its risk percentile and burn-probability percentile are the furthest apart of any community in this dataset. That is expected, not a data bug — risk (RPS) folds in what's actually built there, while burn probability measures fire likelihood on its own, so a place with high fire likelihood but few structures in harm's way can carry a much lower risk score than its burn-probability number alone would suggest, and vice versa.

Where to go next

See the range this plays out across: Anza, CA, Sunshine, NM, Haviland, OH.

Direct, Indirect and Minimal Wildfire Exposure, Explained · CA/OR Wildfire Disclosure Law and the CA FAIR Plan