Metro areas with the most wildfire loss exposure
Just four months into 2024, CoreLogic reports 1.75 million acres in the U.S. have been burned by wildfires.
There were 56,580 wildfires reported in the United States in 2023 that consumed nearly 2.7 million acres, the National Interagency Fire Center reports. This included a total of 4,318 destroyed structures, including 3,060 residences, 1,228 minor structures and 51 commercial or mixed residential structures.
Just four months into 2024, CoreLogic reports 1.75 million acres in the U.S. have been burned by wildfires, including a record-breaking wildfire in the Texas panhandle in February that burned more than 1 million acres.
These wildfires are beginning to occur more frequently near metropolitan areas in what is referred to as the wildland urban interface (WUI). According to the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), the WUI is an area of transition between human development and unoccupied land. More densely populated residential areas possess greater financial exposure to wildfires than open land. The USFA reports that the states with the greatest number of houses in the WUI are California, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Recently, CoreLogic released their annual wildfire hazard analysis in which they calculated residential exposure to higher categories of wildfire risk, along with the reconstruction cost (RCV) for residences in those areas. They found the U.S. metropolitan areas with the highest wildfire exposure are:
1. Los Angeles, California: 185,763 residences with an RCV of $143.3 billion
2. Riverside, California: 166,372 residences with an RCV of $86.6 billion
3. San Diego, California: 123,060 residences with an RCV of $75.6 billion
4. Sacramento, California: 91,475 residences with an RCV of $53.2 billion
5. San Francisco, California: 56,985 residences with an RCV of $40.2 billion
6. Oxnard, California: 39,918 residences with an RCV of $27.4 billion
7. Austin, Texas: 64,768 residences with an RCV of $27.3 billion
8. Denver, Colorado: 57,371 residences with an RCV of $25.9 billion
9. Truckee, California: 43,674 residences with an RCV of $20.9 billion
10. Colorado Springs, Colorado: 39,854 residences with an RCV of $17.4 billion
11. Santa Rosa, California: 23,920 residences with an RCV of $15.8 billion
12. Salinas, California: 18,380 residences with an RCV of $13 billion
13. Redding, California: 28,271 residences with an RCV of $11.4 billion
14. Bend, Oregon: 24,755 residences with an RCV of $10.2 billion
15. Edwards, Colorado: 13,506 residences with an RCV of $8.9 billion
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of the most vulnerable metro areas are in California, and all cities on the list are in the western U.S. However, this should not be taken as reassurance that those in other areas of the country are safe from wildfire risk. According to the USFA, the WUI area continues to grow by about 2 million acres annually, and more than 60,000 U.S. communities are currently at risk for WUI fires. In total, there are approximately 45 million residences at risk in the WUI, and that number is growing each year.