Buying a home in California? Maybe check these wildfire risk maps first

By Kunle Falayi

If you are prospective homeowner in the U.S., especially in California, the state with the highest estimated number of housing units directly at risk of wildfire annually, it may be wise to check the wildfire risk level in the location you are interested in.

Enter the USDA spatial dataset of wildfire risk dataset. The dataset gives a great idea of what risks residents and homeowners may expect in each state and county. Because I'm nice, I didn't want you to pore over this dataset, I have simply mapped it for you. Each row in the dataset represents each county in the US with 46 of the columns representing different measurements of risk.

In these maps, I focus on three of those columns: ‘expected annual housing units exposed(to wildfire risks)’, total number of housing units exposed and percentage of expected annual housing units with direct exposure. Rather than map the national risks level by county, I map by state by grouping the state, summing the expected annual and total number of HUs exposed. The percentage, I summed together, divided each state total by the number of rows in each state and divided by 100 to get the percentage of expected annual direct exposure for each state.

In the second map, I filtered the first county-level dataset to only California and used this as a second layer. Don't mind the scary red of California. Once you zoom into the state, the counties are better, maybe.

Note: I believe a quantile classification of the color scheme does more justice to the variations in the number of housing units classified under expected annual direct wildfire expsure.