The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection this week released new fire hazard severity zone maps for dozens of inland Northern California cities and towns — the first updates to maps for these areas in more than a decade.
The new maps add more than 377,000 acres into zones where increased fire safety regulations will apply. The release launches a two-month rollout of new fire hazard maps that will culminate on March 24 with maps for Southern California.
The updates are expected to increase the extent of “very high” and “high” hazard zone areas — where most increased fire safety regulations apply — by some 1.4 million acres.
In this first release, all but one of the cities Cal Fire mapped saw an increase in acres zoned. Out of the 35 cities included, Truckee in Nevada County and Chico in Butte County saw the largest increases in acreage in the two zones where most regulations apply.
The only city the agency mapped that saw a decrease in hazard severity zoning was Placerville in El Dorado County. Previously, the vast majority of the city was cloaked in a red “very high” hazard zone. Now orange and yellow “high” and “moderate” zones cut through part of the town, but the central district lies outside the hazard zones altogether.
The release started a 120-day clock for local jurisdictions to receive public input, officially adopt the maps and begin enforcing the heightened fire safety regulations that come with them.
The new maps focus only on areas where local fire departments are responsible for putting out blazes. Cal Fire released updated maps for the areas where the state is responsible for controlling fires in September 2023. The agency previously mapped only the “very high” zones for the areas where local governments are responsible, but the state Legislature passed a law in 2021 ordering Cal Fire to also map “moderate” and “high” zones in those regions as well.
Cal Fire had zoned 72,000 acres as “very high” across the 16 Northern California counties in its old maps, created between 2008 and 2011. In its updated maps, the agency zoned nearly 600,000 acres as either “moderate,” “high” or “very high” fire hazard in the region.
In addition to widening the scope of Cal Fire’s mapping project, the 2021 law extended many fire safety regulations — including building codes to make homes more resistant to fires — from the agency’s “very high” zones to its “high” hazard zones as well. That means the new maps will force many more property owners to build or renovate with fire safety in mind.
Cal Fire said it made only slight improvements in its fire models between the old and new local responsibility maps, including using more detailed and up-to-date climate data and calculating hazard based on the most extreme windy and dry conditions possible.
PDFs for each city and county, along with more information and acreage data, are available on Cal Fire’s website.
