Rough and Ready, CA
How exposed is Rough and Ready to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Rough and Ready lands at the 99th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 645 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Rough and Ready at the 98th percentile, close to its 99th-percentile risk score.
Rough and Ready's building exposure, zone by zone
645 buildings are counted in Rough and Ready, and 98% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
Rough and Ready against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Rough and Ready's 99th national percentile and its 87th percentile inside California, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rough and Ready ranks 439 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,256 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 209 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Rough and Ready and the insurance market
Because Rough and Ready 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 Rough and Ready
Because Direct exposure dominates in Rough and Ready (98%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Rough and Ready's 439-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Rough and Ready, see the exposure-zones guide.