Palermo, CA
Palermo, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Palermo sits at the 93rd 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 3,784 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 Palermo at the 93rd percentile, close to its 93rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Palermo's 3,784 counted buildings, 92.3% carry Direct exposure and only 0.1% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where Palermo ranks
Palermo's 93rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 67th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 25 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palermo ranks 2,355 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,440 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 512 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Palermo
Palermo's 93rd-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Palermo's 92.3% 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 Palermo's 2,355-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Palermo, see the exposure-zones guide.