Tulelake, CA
How exposed is Tulelake to wildfire?
Tulelake sits at the 20th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 587 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Tulelake at the 23rd percentile, close to its 20th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 10.7% of Tulelake's 587 buildings carry Direct exposure and 24.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 64.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Where Tulelake ranks
Tulelake's 20th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 2nd ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 19 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tulelake ranks 25,171 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,997 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,545 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Tulelake
Tulelake sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 20th-percentile score like Tulelake's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Tulelake
Tulelake's 64.9% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 587 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Tulelake. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Tulelake, see the exposure-zones guide.