Live Oak (Santa Cruz), CA
Live Oak (Santa Cruz), CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Live Oak (Santa Cruz) lands at the 71st percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 6,189 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Live Oak (Santa Cruz) at the 71st national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Live Oak (Santa Cruz)'s buildings actually sit
Most of Live Oak (Santa Cruz)'s buildings (46.8% of 6,189) 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 6,189 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Live Oak (Santa Cruz) compares
Inside California, Live Oak (Santa Cruz) sits at just the 29th percentile even though it scores 71st 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, Live Oak (Santa Cruz) ranks 9,036 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,803 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,113 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Live Oak (Santa Cruz)
Live Oak (Santa Cruz) sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 71st-percentile score like Live Oak (Santa Cruz)'s can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Live Oak (Santa Cruz)'s 46.8% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 6,189 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Live Oak (Santa Cruz). For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Live Oak (Santa Cruz), see the exposure-zones guide.