Samoa, CA
Samoa, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Samoa at the 37th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 191 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 Samoa at the 33rd percentile, close to its 37th-percentile risk score.
Where Samoa's buildings actually sit
USFS puts 75.9% of Samoa's 191 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 3.7% Direct and 20.4% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Samoa compares
Samoa's 37th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 5th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 32 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Samoa ranks 19,969 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,185 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,499 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Samoa and the insurance market
Samoa's 37th-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 Samoa
Samoa's 75.9% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Samoa's 19,969-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Samoa, see the exposure-zones guide.