Palos Verdes Estates, CA
Palos Verdes Estates, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Palos Verdes Estates's 5,849 buildings earn a 53rd-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Palos Verdes Estates at the 54th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Palos Verdes Estates rates 69.4% Minimal exposure against just 30.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 5,849 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 5,849 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Palos Verdes Estates compares
Inside California, Palos Verdes Estates sits at just the 13th percentile even though it scores 53rd 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, Palos Verdes Estates ranks 14,897 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,945 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,372 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Palos Verdes Estates
Palos Verdes Estates's 53rd-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 Palos Verdes Estates
Even with 69.4% of Palos Verdes Estates outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
Where Palos Verdes Estates's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,849 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Palos Verdes Estates. The exposure-zones guide covers what Palos Verdes Estates's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.