{
  "title": "Wildfire Risk in El Dorado County, CA 2026 | Satelife",
  "description": "El Dorado County wildfire risk analyzed with satellite data: Caldor Fire legacy, ridge-and-canyon geography, evacuation constraints, and a real property report from Grizzly Flats. Check your address.",
  "image": "https://satelife.ai/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/el-dorado-county-locator.png",
  "canonical": "https://satelife.ai/wildfire-risk/california/el-dorado-county/",
  "content": "[Home](/)›[Wildfire Risk](/wildfire-risk/)›[California](/wildfire-risk/california/)›El Dorado County\n\nEl Dorado County, California · 2026\n\n# Wildfire risk in El Dorado County: the risk that _doesn't reset_ after the fire\n\nThree fires over 75,000 acres since 2014 — King, Caldor, Mosquito. Communities on forested ridges between river canyons. An insurance market in retreat. This page maps El Dorado County's structural wildfire risk with satellite data and a real property-level report from inside the Caldor burn scar.\n\n[Get your El Dorado County wildfire risk PDF →](/#cta) [See the Grizzly Flats case study ↓](#case-study)\n\n![Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk — El Dorado County, California”, with the county boundary outlined and Grizzly Flats, Pollock Pines, Placerville and the Caldor Fire origin point marked between Placerville and Lake Tahoe](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/el-dorado-county-locator.webp)\n\nEl Dorado County on satellite imagery — county boundary with Placerville, Pollock Pines, Grizzly Flats, and the 2021 Caldor Fire origin marked. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nLocal context\n\n## A county that keeps producing _megafires_\n\nEl Dorado County runs from the Sacramento Valley floor at El Dorado Hills up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the shore of Lake Tahoe. Most of its population lives in the middle elevations — Placerville, Camino, Pollock Pines, Georgetown, Grizzly Flats — exactly the mixed-conifer belt where California's largest fires now burn. The recent record:\n\n-   **King Fire (2014)** — 97,717 acres, ignited near Pollock Pines, an arson start that ran 15 miles up the Rubicon drainage in a single evening.\n-   **Caldor Fire (2021)** — 221,835 acres, ignited in the Middle Fork Cosumnes drainage on August 14, destroyed most of Grizzly Flats, jumped Highway 50, crossed the Sierra crest, and forced the evacuation of South Lake Tahoe. More than 1,000 structures lost.\n-   **Mosquito Fire (2022)** — 76,788 acres in the American River canyon on the Placer–El Dorado county line; California's largest fire of 2022.\n\nThe fire season runs June through October, with the most destructive events historically falling in August and September, when fuel moisture bottoms out and terrain-driven wind events align with the canyons.\n\n![NASA MODIS satellite image from August 2021 showing the Caldor Fire smoke plume streaming northeast across Lake Tahoe and into Nevada](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/caldor-fire-nasa-smoke-plume.webp)\n\nThe Caldor Fire's smoke plume from space, August 2021 — streaming across Lake Tahoe and into Nevada. Source: NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caldor_amo_2021242_lrg.jpg) (public domain).\n\nSources: CAL FIRE Incident Archive · NIFC · NASA Earth Observatory.\n\nTerrain & vegetation\n\n## Trap geography: communities on ridges _between river canyons_\n\nLook at where the county's wildland-urban interface communities actually sit. **Grizzly Flats** occupies a forested ridge between the forks of the Cosumnes River. **Pollock Pines** sits on the divide above the South Fork American River. **Georgetown** holds the divide between the Middle and South Forks of the American. Ridge roads were where you could build — but it is precisely the layout fire exploits.\n\nSteep river canyons pre-heat fuels, channel wind, and accelerate flame fronts upslope. A fire that starts at the bottom of a drainage arrives at the ridgetop community above it with terrain-driven momentum. That is what the King Fire did in the Rubicon in 2014, and what the Caldor Fire did to Grizzly Flats in 2021: ignition in the canyon below, a run uphill into town. The terrain layer in Satelife's Grizzly Flats analysis scores **65 / 100** before a single tree is counted — slope and aspect alone put a thumb on the scale.\n\nThe fuel is mixed conifer — ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, incense cedar, white fir — with oak woodland and brush at the lower elevations. Decades of fire suppression left dense, ladder-fueled stands; post-fire landscapes regrow into brush and young plantations that carry fire faster than the mature forest they replaced.\n\n![Firefighter silhouetted against crowning flames and pink smoke during night burning operations on the 2021 Caldor Fire in El Dorado County](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/caldor-fire-burning-operations.webp)\n\nBurning operations on the Caldor Fire, 2021. Source: National Interagency Fire Center, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2021_Caldor_Fire_burning_operations.jpg) (public domain).\n\nEvacuation\n\n## Hazard maps say where fire is likely. They say nothing about _whether you can leave_\n\nSatelife's community-scale analysis of Grizzly Flats builds the evacuation picture from the actual road graph and structure footprints — 257 structures across 1,709 hectares, gridded into 100-metre zones. The numbers:\n\n257structures in the analyzed community area\n\n9independent exit routes to the wider road network\n\n~29structures per exit route\n\n32 minmodelled fire-truck drive-time from the nearest full-time mapped station (22.8 km)\n\nNine exits sounds reassuring until you trace where they converge: the route analysis found a single-point-of-failure segment of roughly **20 metres** that multiple evacuation paths depend on. If that one stretch is blocked — fire, a fallen tree, an abandoned vehicle — the redundancy collapses. Modelled fire-truck drive-times to the community's hotspot zones run **28 to 36 minutes**. In 2021, residents described escaping through flames on these same roads; the network being rebuilt today is the same one.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife neighborhood wildfire report for Grizzly Flats: fire-service reach and community egress table showing 32.4-minute fastest fire-truck drive-time, 4 stations within 15 km, 9 independent road exits, and per-hotspot drive-times of 28 to 36 minutes](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/report-egress.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Access & Evacuation, Satelife Neighborhood Wildfire Risk Report for Grizzly Flats, CA (July 2026). Modelled OSRM drive-times from OSM-mapped stations; Grizzly Flats' own volunteer-staffed Pioneer FPD Station 35, reopened after the Caldor Fire, is not yet mapped in OSM and would shorten local response. Decision support, not an evacuation plan.\n\nThe post-fire cycle\n\n## The _illusion of safety_ after a megafire\n\nHere is the counterintuitive part: right now, some of Grizzly Flats' risk indicators look _good_. The vegetation layer in Satelife's community analysis reads around **22 / 100** — because the forest that would carry the next fire mostly burned in the last one. Standing among cleared lots and young regrowth in 2026, it is easy to conclude the danger has passed.\n\nIt hasn't. It's cyclical. Three things did not burn away:\n\n-   **The hazard classification.** CAL FIRE's Fire Hazard Severity Zone model scores long-term hazard from climate, terrain, and fire behavior over decades. Grizzly Flats remains **Very High** — 90/100 in the Satelife hazard layer, exactly as before the Caldor Fire.\n-   **The climate.** The fire-weather signal that dried the Caldor's fuels scores 56/100 at this location and is trending the wrong way.\n-   **The topography.** The canyons are permanent.\n\nMeanwhile the fuel is coming back — post-fire Sierra landscapes regrow into brush and dense young stands that carry fire faster than mature forest. The low vegetation score is a temporary reprieve with an expiration date, and every home rebuilt during the reprieve will spend most of its life inside the next fuel cycle.\n\n![Burned forest and scorched ski-lift towers at Sierra-at-Tahoe resort after the 2021 Caldor Fire, El Dorado County](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/caldor-fire-sierra-at-tahoe-aftermath.webp)\n\nSierra-at-Tahoe after the Caldor Fire. Source: National Interagency Fire Center, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caldor_Fire_-_51484398604.jpg) (public domain).\n\n![Grizzly Flats community boundary outlined on current satellite imagery, showing the town sitting inside the visible grey-brown burn scar of the 2021 Caldor Fire](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/grizzly-flats-caldor-burn-scar.webp)\n\nThe Grizzly Flats boundary on current satellite imagery — the grey-brown tone surrounding the town is the Caldor burn scar. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nCase study\n\n## One address on String Canyon Road, _scored today_\n\nTo make the county's risk concrete, we ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on **String Canyon Road, Grizzly Flats** — inside the rebuilt community, inside the burn scar, inside the Very High zone. The composite score: **58 / 100 — High tier**, built from ten independently-scored data layers rather than one hazard polygon.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for String Canyon Road, Grizzly Flats: per-layer contributions showing Hazard 90, Vision 78, Terrain 65, USFS WRC 57, Fire Weather 56, Vegetation 51, Road access 50, Fire history 50, Fire-spread simulation 5](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/report-per-layer.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, String Canyon Road, Grizzly Flats, CA 95636 (July 2026). Composite 58/100, High tier.\n\nWhat drives the score:\n\n-   **Hazard zone: 90/100.** The parcel sits squarely in CAL FIRE's Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.\n-   **AI vision analysis: 78/100.** The model reads aerial and street-level imagery of the actual property: mature trees close to the home, connected fuels inside the defensible-space envelope, limited maintained clearance, canopy over built areas, and receptive surface fuels beyond the improved margins.\n-   **Fire history: 50/100 — and it names the Caldor.** The layer finds 2 fires within 20 years, most recent 2021: CALDOR (221,784 acres) heads the incident list, alongside BALTIC (2013), HAPPY VALLEY (1929), and GRIZZLY FLAT (1919).\n-   **Fire behavior:** USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities data puts the probability of flame lengths over four feet at this location at roughly **22%** in a fire event.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report: fire history layer listing the Caldor Fire 2021 at 221,784 acres, Baltic 2013, Happy Valley 1929 and Grizzly Flat 1919, with 2 fires in the last 20 years and most recent 2021](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/report-fire-history.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Fire history: the layer names the Caldor Fire (2021, 221,784 acres) as the most recent perimeter reaching this parcel.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report: street-view vision sweep with north, east, south and west findings — heavy fuels near structure, overhanging vegetation, no visible defensible space, narrow access](/images/wildfire-risk/el-dorado-county/report-vision-sweep.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Vision sweep by direction: three of four aspects rate High, with findings like \"heavy fuels near structure\" and \"no visible defensible space\".\n\nThe FHSZ polygon says \"Very High\" for every parcel in Grizzly Flats equally. The report says _this_ house has trees over the roofline and receptive fuels at the fence line — and which three actions, in order, change that.\n\nThe report pairs the score with a prioritized mitigation plan for this exact parcel: establish an ember-resistant Zone 0 in the first five feet, harden the roof and screen vents against ember intrusion, and maintain thirty feet of lean, clean and green space. Under SB 1060-era rules, completing and documenting that work is not just safety advice — it is insurance evidence.\n\nInsurance & real estate\n\n## The _insurance squeeze_ in El Dorado County\n\nCounty homeowners feel all of the above through their insurance bill — when they can get one. Since 2021 the pattern across the county's WUI communities has been carrier non-renewals followed by migration to the **California FAIR Plan**, the state's insurer of last resort, which surpassed 400,000 policies statewide in 2024 — roughly double its 2020 count. FAIR Plan coverage is more expensive and thinner than the policies it replaces.\n\nThe regulatory response matters here: **SB 1060** (in force 2025) requires carriers that use wildfire risk models to account for property- and community-level mitigation — defensible space, home hardening, community fuel breaks — rather than pricing on hazard zone alone. Together with the Safer from Wildfires framework, that creates a financial reason to prove, with evidence, what your specific parcel looks like. A zone map can't do that. An address-level report can.\n\nFor buyers and sellers, California Civil Code §1103 requires Natural Hazard Disclosure at the point of sale — and as insurance availability tightens, fire-zone status becomes a closing-risk variable rather than a paperwork item. A buyer who cannot bind insurance cannot close. See [California wildfire insurance](/insurance/fire-risk/california/) and [California real estate wildfire risk](/real-estate/fire-risk/california/).\n\nSources: California Department of Insurance · California FAIR Plan · SB 1060 text.\n\nRisk reduction\n\n## What El Dorado County homeowners _can actually do_\n\nCAL FIRE's defensible-space framework defines three zones: Zone 0 (0–5 ft, ember-resistant, no combustibles), Zone 1 (5–30 ft, lean-clean-green), and Zone 2 (30–100 ft, reduced fuel). Documented compliance is what underwriters and the SB 1060 discount process accept as evidence. Locally, the **El Dorado County Fire Safe Council** coordinates community fuel-reduction projects and can advise on neighborhood-scale work — the kind that shows up in the community-egress and hotspot layers of a Satelife neighborhood report.\n\nAnnual review is the rule, not the exception: vegetation regrows, and in a post-fire landscape like Grizzly Flats it regrows fast and flashy. A parcel that passed inspection in 2024 is not necessarily compliant in 2026.\n\nCoverage\n\n## ZIP codes we cover in El Dorado County\n\nSatelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in El Dorado County. The ZIPs below are the high Fire Hazard Severity Zone, Wildland-Urban Interface communities we are asked about most. One caveat that is the whole point of what we do: the risk score is computed for **your parcel**, not the ZIP, so two homes on the same street can land in different tiers. Find your area, then [run your address](/#cta).\n\nZIP code\n\nCommunity\n\nWhy it is on the map\n\n95636\n\nGrizzly Flats\n\nCaldor Fire (2021) razed the town; String Canyon Road case study\n\n95726\n\nPollock Pines\n\nHighway 50 forest WUI, on the Caldor Fire front\n\n95709\n\nCamino\n\nApple Hill forest WUI east of Placerville\n\n95684\n\nSomerset\n\nRidge WUI, Caldor Fire southern exposure\n\n95667\n\nPlacerville\n\nFoothill WUI at the county core\n\n95634\n\nGeorgetown\n\nDivide-country forest WUI, single ridge egress\n\n95720\n\nKyburz\n\nHighway 50 canyon, Caldor Fire burn\n\n96150\n\nSouth Lake Tahoe\n\nCaldor Fire forced a full-basin evacuation in 2021\n\nZIP areas per USPS; Wildland-Urban Interface and Fire Hazard Severity Zone framing per CAL FIRE.\n\nWhere to go next\n\n## El Dorado County wildfire risk _in context_\n\n[California wildfire risk The statewide picture: FHSZ, county exposure, 2026 season](/wildfire-risk/california/) [San Diego County wildfire risk Cedar & Witch Fire legacy, backcountry WUI case study](/wildfire-risk/california/san-diego-county/) [Los Angeles County wildfire risk Woolsey & Palisades Fire legacy, Malibu case study](/wildfire-risk/california/los-angeles-county/) [California wildfire insurance FAIR Plan, non-renewals, SB 1060 discount path](/insurance/fire-risk/california/) [California real estate wildfire risk Buyer due diligence and disclosure](/real-estate/fire-risk/california/) [Create a wildfire evacuation plan Zones, egress routes, refuge areas](/wildfire-evacuation-plan/) [How Satelife calculates wildfire risk Data sources, score composition](/wildfire-risk/methodology/) [Run a wildfire risk report PDF + score + mitigation plan](/#cta)\n\nFAQ\n\n## Frequently asked questions about _El Dorado County wildfire risk_\n\nIs El Dorado County a high wildfire risk area?\n\nYes. Large parts of the county’s populated western slope — the Highway 50 corridor from Placerville through Camino and Pollock Pines, plus ridge communities like Grizzly Flats and Georgetown — sit in CAL FIRE High or Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. The county has recorded three 75,000+ acre fires since 2014 (King, Caldor, Mosquito).\n\nWhat was the largest wildfire in El Dorado County?\n\nThe 2021 Caldor Fire — 221,835 acres. It ignited in the Middle Fork Cosumnes drainage on August 14, 2021, destroyed most of Grizzly Flats within days, jumped Highway 50, crossed the Sierra crest, and forced the evacuation of South Lake Tahoe before containment in October.\n\nIs it safe to rebuild in Grizzly Flats after the Caldor Fire?\n\nThe hazard classification did not change: Grizzly Flats remains in a CAL FIRE Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and a current Satelife hazard layer for a Grizzly Flats address still reads 90/100. Rebuilding is happening — the question is construction standard and defensible space. Homes rebuilt to Chapter 7A ember-resistant standards with documented mitigation face materially different exposure than the pre-2021 housing stock did.\n\nHow do I check the fire hazard zone for my El Dorado County address?\n\nUse the CAL FIRE FHSZ viewer for the official Moderate / High / Very High zone classification. For property-level detail — terrain, fuels, fire history, evacuation constraints, and an AI read of your actual parcel imagery — run a Satelife address-level report.\n\nCan wildfire mitigation lower my insurance premium in El Dorado County?\n\nYes. Under SB 1060 (in force 2025), California carriers that use wildfire risk models must account for property- and community-level mitigation. Documented defensible space and home hardening — the kind of evidence a Satelife report captures — feeds directly into that discount pathway, alongside the Safer from Wildfires framework.\n\nScores and evacuation figures on this page are drawn from Satelife wildfire-risk reports for Grizzly Flats, CA generated in July 2026 (property report, String Canyon Road; neighborhood analysis, Grizzly Flats CDP). Satelife reports are informational decision support — not a substitute for official evacuation orders, CAL FIRE hazard determinations, or an insurer's underwriting judgement.\n\n## What does _your parcel_ look like, layer by layer?\n\nIf you own, are buying, or are rebuilding in El Dorado County — Grizzly Flats, Pollock Pines, Georgetown, Camino, or anywhere along the Highway 50 corridor — get the address-level answer: PDF, ten-layer score, and a prioritized mitigation plan.\n\n[Start with your address →](/#cta)\n\n[![PRR](/images/prr.png)](/ficha-de-website-voucher-satelife.pdf)\n\n© 2024–2026 Satelife, Lda. All rights reserved.\n\nSatelife reports are for informational purposes only and do not constitute insurance, financial, or legal advice."
}