Red Bluff, CA
How exposed is Red Bluff to wildfire?
USFS scores Red Bluff at the 93rd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 5,851 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Red Bluff at the 94th percentile, close to its 93rd-percentile risk score.
Where Red Bluff's buildings actually sit
Most of Red Bluff's buildings (76.6%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 5,851 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Red Bluff compares
Red Bluff's 93rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 68th 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, Red Bluff ranks 2,258 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,943 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 503 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Red Bluff and the insurance market
Because Red Bluff 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.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Red Bluff (76.6% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Red Bluff's figures come from
Red Bluff's 93rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Red Bluff's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.