Sierra Madre, CA
How exposed is Sierra Madre to wildfire?
Sierra Madre's 5,337 buildings earn a 99th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Sierra Madre at the 98th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
78.8% of Sierra Madre's 5,337 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 21.2% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone. At 5,337 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Sierra Madre ranks
There's little gap between Sierra Madre's 99th national percentile and its 90th percentile inside California, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sierra Madre ranks 308 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,234 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 161 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
Because Sierra Madre 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Sierra Madre (78.8% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sierra Madre's 308-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Sierra Madre, see the exposure-zones guide.