Mad River, CA
How exposed is Mad River to wildfire?
Mad River's 435 buildings earn a 96th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Mad River at the 94th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
Mad River's building exposure, zone by zone
435 buildings are counted in Mad River, and 99.8% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Mad River compares
Inside California, Mad River sits at just the 75th percentile even though it scores 96th 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, Mad River ranks 1,408 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 18,543 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 392 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Mad River
Mad River's 96th-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 Mad River
Mad River's 99.8% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Mad River's 1,408-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Mad River, see the exposure-zones guide.