Mead Valley, CA
Mead Valley, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Mead Valley at the 91st national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 7,576 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Mead Valley at the 93rd percentile, close to its 91st-percentile risk score.
Mead Valley's building exposure, zone by zone
Direct exposure dominates in Mead Valley: 82.1% of its 7,576 buildings, versus 12.2% Indirect and 5.7% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap. At 7,576 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Mead Valley compares
Inside California, Mead Valley sits at just the 65th percentile even though it scores 91st 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, Mead Valley ranks 2,701 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,257 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 555 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 Mead Valley 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.
Hardening a home in Mead Valley
Because Direct exposure dominates in Mead Valley (82.1%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Mead Valley's 2,701-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Mead Valley, see the exposure-zones guide.