San Gabriel, CA
How exposed is San Gabriel to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, San Gabriel lands at the 50th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 12,887 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 San Gabriel at the 54th percentile, close to its 50th-percentile risk score.
San Gabriel's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 99.2% of San Gabriel's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.8% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 12,887 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where San Gabriel ranks
Inside California, San Gabriel sits at just the 11th percentile even though it scores 50th 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, San Gabriel ranks 15,716 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,181 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,406 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
San Gabriel's 50th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 99.2% of San Gabriel 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 San Gabriel's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,887 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for San Gabriel. The exposure-zones guide covers what San Gabriel's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.