Mendota, CA
How exposed is Mendota to wildfire?
Mendota sits at the 83rd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 2,479 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Mendota at the 84th percentile, close to its 83rd-percentile risk score.
Where Mendota's buildings actually sit
2,479 buildings are counted in Mendota, and 94.6% of them are Indirect exposure — ember-driven risk rather than the 5.2% in Direct exposure or the 0.2% rated Minimal.
How Mendota compares
Inside California, Mendota sits at just the 45th percentile even though it scores 83rd 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, Mendota ranks 5,381 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,340 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 867 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Mendota and the insurance market
Mendota 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 83rd-percentile score like Mendota's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 94.6% of Mendota's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Mendota's 83rd-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 Mendota, see the exposure-zones guide.