Ridgecrest Heights, CA
Ridgecrest Heights, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Ridgecrest Heights at the 42nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 279 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 Ridgecrest Heights at the 47th percentile, close to its 42nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Ridgecrest Heights's 279 counted buildings, 60.2% carry Direct exposure and only 0.4% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Ridgecrest Heights against the rest of the country
Inside California, Ridgecrest Heights sits at just the 7th percentile even though it scores 42nd 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, Ridgecrest Heights ranks 18,177 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,208 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,468 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Ridgecrest Heights and the insurance market
Because Ridgecrest Heights 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 Ridgecrest Heights
With 60.2% of Ridgecrest Heights in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Ridgecrest Heights's 18,177-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Ridgecrest Heights, see the exposure-zones guide.