New fire maps put nearly 4 million Californians in hazardous zones. What does that mean for the people who live there?

BY BEN CHRISTOPHER

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

New bursts of yellow dot the hills of Mendocino County.

Smears of burnt orange now span the aqueduct near Bakersfield.

A fresh splash of crimson just east of Chico like a fresh wound.

With the release of its fourth and final round of color-coded hazard maps this morning, California’s firefighting agency is showing just how much of the state is prone to wildfire — and how much that computationally-modeled danger zone has grown since the state issued its last round of local hazard maps more than a decade ago.

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With a few notable areas where the orange and red tide receded, like the hills above Berkeley and Oakland, territory deemed “high” or “very high” hazard exploded across the state, increasing by 168% since 2011.

All told, the size of these orange and red patches on the new maps is 3,626 square miles — an area nearly twice the size of Delaware.

That’s home to roughly 3.7 million people, according to a CalMatters analysis which combined the maps with finegrain population estimates from University of California researchers.

That means roughly 1-in-10 Californians are subject to an array of building code, defensible space and real estate disclosure rules, all of which could have lasting effects on how people live, communities plan and housing markets function in the state’s most flammable neighborhoods. 

Included among them: Many homeowners in the burn scar of the Eaton Fire. Compared to the prior maps, the hazard areas encroach roughly half a mile further out of the hills and into a recently torched Altadena. Homeowners who find their addresses in this newly expanded zone will be required to rebuild to a heightened fire-resistant building code.

California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Cal Fire, has been releasing these maps in installments over the last six weeks, beginning with counties in the state’s far north and ending today with Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego and everything inland south of Owens Valley. 

They only cover the cities and towns where local fire departments are responsible for managing wildfire. The parts of the state where Cal Fire is in charge were remapped in late 2022 and also depicted a spike in hazard zones. Federal lands, which account for about 45% of all the land in California, are not included in either set of maps.

It’s a project that has been in the works for years. But in the wake of the Los Angeles’ January fire storms, their release coincides with renewed public anxiety over wildfire risk, the state’s fragile home insurance market and the management of development in places most prone to burning. 

Why is the danger zone growing?

Different colors come with different rules.

In orange “high” hazard zones within the so-called local responsibility areas, newly constructed homes must meet heightened fire-resistant building standards. Anyone hoping to sell a home will also have to alert would-be buyers of the elevated danger with a disclosure form. 

Homeowners who find themselves in the “‘very high” hazard zones will be subject to those rules and more. They will also need to clear a 100-foot circle around their property free of brush, dead trees and other flammable materials. New subdivisions will also need to be carefully designed with multiple evacuation routes, adequate water supply infrastructure and built-in fuel breaks in place.

In the state responsibility area, all the above requirements apply across all three levels of hazard. 

In theory, the yellow, orange and red areas aren’t supposed to grow all that much from decade to decade.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters