Hacienda Heights, CA
Hacienda Heights wildfire risk explained
Hacienda Heights's 16,643 buildings earn a 79th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Hacienda Heights at the 78th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 67.2% of Hacienda Heights's 16,643 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 5.4% Direct and 27.3% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 16,643 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Hacienda Heights against the rest of the country
Inside California, Hacienda Heights sits at just the 40th percentile even though it scores 79th 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, Hacienda Heights ranks 6,487 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 871 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 949 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Hacienda Heights and the insurance market
Because Hacienda Heights 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.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Hacienda Heights (67.2% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Hacienda Heights's 79th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Hacienda Heights, see the exposure-zones guide.