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The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection will begin rolling out a long-awaited update to its fire hazard severity zones Monday, which is set to more than double the number of acres in local fire jurisdictions that must comply with stricter fire safety building codes.
Previously, the state mapped and applied fire safety regulations only to local areas with the highest possible fire hazards, deemed “very high.” But in 2021, the state Legislature ordered Cal Fire to expand the mapping to include “high” hazard zones so the Legislature could apply fire-safety building regulations to the new “high” zones as well.
The new maps are expected to expand the roughly 800,000 acres currently in local fire jurisdictions zoned as “very high” by an additional 247,000 acres. Some 1.16 million acres will be categorized into the new “high” zones, according to a press release from the governor’s office.
Cal Fire will also release new “moderate” hazard zones, its lowest hazard classification that is rarely referenced in fire safety regulations, but did not state how many acres it would encompass.
The agency hasn’t released maps for these local areas — on city and county land where local fire departments, not Cal Fire, are responsible for responding to fires — since 2011.
Cal Fire initially planned to release the maps in January, but the Los Angeles firestorms halted the rollout. Cal Fire officials said many of the agency’s mapping personnel, including scientists, were supporting the firefighting and recovery efforts and that they didn’t want to burden communities already facing the daunting task of rebuilding.
However, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order Thursday on fire safety that, in part, ordered Cal Fire to release the maps, the agency obliged.
The agency will begin the rollout by releasing maps for inland Northern California on Monday. Cal Fire will then publish maps for coastal Northern California on Feb. 24, the Central Coast and Central Valley on March 10, and Southern California — including L.A., San Bernardino, and San Diego counties — on March 24.
Once released, the new maps will go to hundreds of cities and counties across the state. They’ll have four months to adopt the maps and begin applying the heightened fire-safety regulations. The local jurisdictions can opt to increase the hazard area or ratings — but cannot decrease them.
The severity zones are referenced in at least 50 different pieces of legislation, codes, grants and other state rules and documents.
Many regulations apply only to new constructions and significant repairs or remodels: They include Chapter 7A building codes that require property owners building in the “very high” and now “high” zones to take home-hardening measures, including using ignition-resistant materials, covering vents that could allow embers to enter homes and cause ignition from the inside out and installing multipaned or fire-resistant windows.
In 2021, the state passed a law requiring local jurisdictions to consider fire hazard for community-land-use planning, not just individual structures, in “very high” hazard zones. For example, governments must now take into account evacuation routes and the peak stress on the water supply that could occur during disasters, and they must locate essential public facilities like hospitals and emergency command centers outside of high fire-risk areas “when feasible.”
Cal Fire creates maps for the wildland regions where it is responsible for responding to fires and for the more developed areas of the state where local fire departments are responsible for managing fires. The agency released new maps for the state-managed areas in September 2023; however, it hasn’t released maps for local-managed areas in more than a decade.
Cal Fire has told fire safety advocates that it now plans to update the maps roughly every five years.
The release comes shortly after Cal Fire acknowledged weaknesses in its model approach that resulted in the agency zoning only 21% of the Altadena properties within the perimeter of the Eaton fire as “very high” fire hazard, according to an analysis by The Times.
The vast majority of homes destroyed in the Eaton fire were outside of Cal Fire’s “very high” fire hazard severity zones, yet a newer approach by an independent company had found Altadena had “severe” wildfire risk.
Cal Fire said the new maps would largely leave these weaknesses unaddressed, given that newer scientific approaches to address the problem remain too underdeveloped and experimental.
However, the agency did make slight adjustments to its model that resulted in an increase of acres zoned as “very high,” including the use of more detailed climate and extreme-weather data.
This is a developing story.
