{
  "title": "Wildfire Risk in Placer County, CA 2026 | Satelife",
  "description": "Placer County wildfire risk analyzed with satellite data: Mosquito Fire legacy, Foresthill Divide geography, evacuation constraints, and a real property report from Foresthill. Check your address.",
  "image": "https://satelife.ai/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/placer-county-locator.png",
  "canonical": "https://satelife.ai/wildfire-risk/california/placer-county/",
  "content": "[Home](/)›[Wildfire Risk](/wildfire-risk/)›[California](/wildfire-risk/california/)›Placer County\n\nPlacer County, California · 2026\n\n# Wildfire risk in Placer County: the ridge that _keeps burning_\n\nThe 2022 Mosquito Fire — 76,788 acres, California's largest fire that year — ignited near Oxbow Reservoir a few miles from Foresthill and burned for 46 days. Communities sit on a single forested ridge between two river canyons. This page maps Placer County's structural wildfire risk with satellite data and a real property-level report from inside Foresthill.\n\n[Get your Placer County wildfire risk PDF →](/#cta) [See the Foresthill case study ↓](#case-study)\n\n![Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk — Placer County, California”, with the county boundary outlined and Auburn, Colfax, and Foresthill marked near the 2022 Mosquito Fire origin point at Oxbow Reservoir](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/placer-county-locator.webp)\n\nPlacer County on satellite imagery — county boundary with Auburn, Colfax, and Foresthill marked near the 2022 Mosquito Fire's origin point. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nLocal context\n\n## A county whose worst fire started at a _reservoir near Foresthill_\n\nPlacer County runs from the Sacramento Valley floor at Roseville up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada to the Lake Tahoe basin. Most of its foothill and mountain population lives along two corridors — the Interstate 80 corridor through Auburn and Colfax, and the Foresthill Divide, the single ridge road that serves Foresthill, Michigan Bluff, and Iowa Hill above the American River canyons. The recent record:\n\n-   **American Fire (2013)** — 26,194 acres, burning in rugged, roadless terrain of the Tahoe National Forest about 17 miles northeast of Foresthill.\n-   **Mosquito Fire (2022)** — 76,788 acres, California's largest wildfire that year. It ignited on September 6 near Mosquito Road and Oxbow Reservoir on the Middle Fork American River, just east of Foresthill, put more than 11,260 people under evacuation orders including all of Foresthill, burned for 46 days, destroyed 78 structures across Michigan Bluff, Foresthill, and Volcanoville, cost more than $180 million to suppress, and eventually crossed the ridge into El Dorado County.\n\nThe property-level fire-history layer for a Foresthill Road address independently confirms the pattern: three separate NIFC-mapped fire perimeters have reached this exact parcel in the last 20 years alone — Mosquito (2022), Trailhead (2016, 5,645 acres), and Robbers (2012, 2,635 acres) — on top of the 1960 Volcano Fire (42,596 acres). The fire season runs June through October, with the highest-risk window in August and September, when fuel moisture bottoms out on the Foresthill Divide's south- and west-facing slopes.\n\n![Aerial photo of the Mosquito Fire burning in steep terrain above Oxbow Reservoir near Foresthill, Placer County, on the evening of September 6, 2022, with flames and smoke rising from a forested ridge next to the reservoir](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/mosquito-fire-oxbow-ignition.webp)\n\nThe Mosquito Fire in its early hours above Oxbow Reservoir, near the Middle Fork American River and Foresthill — September 6, 2022. Source: United States Forest Service, Tahoe National Forest, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosquito_Fire_2022-09-06_PM_1.jpg) (public domain).\n\nSources: CAL FIRE Incident Archive · NIFC · USDA Forest Service, Tahoe National Forest.\n\nTerrain & vegetation\n\n## One ridge road, _two river canyons_\n\nLook at where Foresthill actually sits: on the **Foresthill Divide**, the single forested ridge between the North Fork and Middle Fork American River canyons. It is the same trap geography that recurs across Sierra foothill fire country — a ridgetop community reachable by one road, flanked on both sides by canyons that pre-heat fuels and channel wind uphill. The terrain layer in Satelife's Foresthill Road analysis scores **65 / 100** from elevation banding alone — the parcel sits at roughly 927 metres, squarely inside the WUI/chaparral elevation band Satelife's model treats as elevated risk.\n\nThat is the terrain the Mosquito Fire exploited in 2022: ignition down in the Middle Fork canyon near Oxbow Reservoir, then a run up onto the Divide toward Foresthill and Michigan Bluff. The fuel above the canyons is mixed conifer — ponderosa pine, Douglas-fir, incense cedar — with brush and oak woodland lower down; decades of fire suppression left dense, ladder-fueled stands that carry fire fast once it reaches the ridge.\n\nOne data wrinkle worth naming honestly: the report's LANDFIRE vegetation layer for this specific 100-metre buffer around the Foresthill Road parcel reads a modest **23 / 100**, classifying the buffer as 85% \"urban\" and 15% \"agricultural\" fuel model — a coarse land-cover read that misses the tree canopy visible in the same report's own street-view imagery. That gap is exactly why Satelife layers an AI vision read on top of the land-cover model: the vision layer for this address scores **82 / 100**, flagging \"heavy fuels near structure\" and \"no visible defensible space\" at ground level. A land-cover polygon can call a lot on a ridge road \"urban\" fuel; a photograph of the actual trees over the roofline cannot.\n\n![Massive white pyrocumulonimbus smoke column rising above the tree line during the 2022 Mosquito Fire near Foresthill, Placer County, California](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/mosquito-fire-pyrocumulonimbus.webp)\n\nA pyrocumulonimbus cloud rises from the Mosquito Fire, September 8, 2022 — the kind of fire-generated weather that Foresthill Divide terrain and canyon winds can produce. Source: CAL FIRE, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosquito_Fire_2022-09-08_PM_2.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 Foresthill builds the evacuation picture from the actual road graph, gridded into 332 zones across the 2,883-hectare CDP boundary. The numbers:\n\n332zones analyzed across the 2,883-hectare community area\n\n11independent exit routes to the wider road network\n\n6.9 minmodelled fire-truck drive-time from Cal Fire Foresthill (4.1 km)\n\n9fire stations mapped within a 15 km search radius\n\nUnlike the ridge communities on this site's El Dorado County page, Foresthill has its own in-town station — Cal Fire Foresthill / Foresthill Fire Station, 4.1 kilometres out — and the route analysis found no single-point-of-failure chokepoint on any of the 11 exit routes: \"nearest bottleneck: none detected.\" The area-wide risk score still comes out **49/100 — Moderate**, and the model resolves the whole community as one hotspot zone with vegetation as the primary driver, rather than the several graduated hotspots a more fragmented road network would produce.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife neighborhood wildfire report for Foresthill: fire-service reach and community egress table showing 6.9-minute fastest fire-truck drive-time from Cal Fire Foresthill, 9 stations within 15 km, 11 independent road exits, and no detected bottleneck](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/report-egress.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Access & Evacuation, Satelife Neighborhood Wildfire Risk Report for Foresthill, CA (July 2026). Modelled OSRM drive-times from OSM-mapped stations. Decision support, not an evacuation plan or a guaranteed response time.\n\nThe hazard that doesn't reset\n\n## Foresthill wasn't _leveled_ — and that's not the same as safe\n\nUnlike Grizzly Flats in the 2021 Caldor Fire, Foresthill itself was largely spared direct structure loss in 2022 — the Mosquito Fire's 78 destroyed structures were concentrated in Michigan Bluff and Volcanoville, with Foresthill mostly surviving under a mandatory evacuation order. That is the trap: a community can go through a 76,788-acre fire next door and conclude the danger passed it by.\n\nIt didn't. Three things didn't change:\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. Foresthill remains **Very High** — 90/100 in the Satelife hazard layer, exactly as before the Mosquito Fire.\n-   **The ridge.** The Foresthill Divide's single-road geography and flanking canyons are permanent.\n-   **The recurrence.** This is now the third fire to reach this exact Foresthill Road parcel in a decade — Robbers (2012), Trailhead (2016), Mosquito (2022) — a pattern the property's fire-history layer scores 70/100, \"High risk.\"\n\nOne more reason zone-level and property-level scores diverge: Satelife's community-wide analysis of Foresthill, evaluated at the CDP's geographic centroid, reads the CAL FIRE hazard layer at just **10/100** — while our case-study parcel a few streets away, on the Divide's Very High-zoned edge, reads **90/100** on the identical layer. Both numbers are correct; a fire hazard zone map isn't a single number for a town, it's a mosaic, and only a property-level report tells you which side of that mosaic your house sits on. The community's own fire-history and vegetation layers, evaluated area-wide, score 90/100 and 70/100 respectively — both High to Very High — so the recurrence and fuel story hold at every scale even where the zone boundary itself does not.\n\n![Sentinel satellite image showing the Mosquito Fire's smoke plume spreading across Placer and El Dorado counties, California, September 9, 2022](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/mosquito-fire-satellite-plume.webp)\n\nThe Mosquito Fire's smoke plume from space, September 9, 2022 — spreading northeast across the Sierra foothills. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by Pierre Markuse, via [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mosquito_Fire,_California,_USA_-_16_September_2022_\\(52364516080\\).jpg) (CC BY 2.0).\n\n![Foresthill community boundary outlined on current satellite imagery, showing the town sitting on a forested ridge between American River canyons near the Placer-El Dorado county line](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/foresthill-boundary.webp)\n\nThe Foresthill CDP boundary on current satellite imagery — the town occupies the ridge top; the American River canyon system that carried the Mosquito Fire runs a few miles to its southeast, toward the El Dorado County line. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.\n\nCase study\n\n## One address on Foresthill Road, _scored today_\n\nTo make the county's risk concrete, we ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on **Foresthill Road, Foresthill** — inside the community, on the Divide, in the Very High zone. The composite score: **56 / 100 — High tier** (88% confidence), built from ten independently-scored data layers rather than one hazard polygon.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for Foresthill Road, Foresthill: per-layer contributions showing Hazard 90, Vision 82, Fire history 70, Terrain 65, Fire Weather 55, Road access 50, USFS WRC 38, Vegetation 23, Fire-spread simulation 5](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/report-per-layer.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, Foresthill Road, Foresthill, CA 95631 (July 2026). Composite 56/100, 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 (State Responsibility Area).\n-   **AI vision analysis: 82/100 — Very High.** The model reads street-level imagery of the actual property: a tree-dense setting with continuous canopy over the frontage and side yards, limited visible clearance around the structure, and tree limbs extending near or over the roofline.\n-   **Fire history: 70/100 — and it names the Mosquito.** The layer finds 3 fires within 20 years, most recent 2022: MOSQUITO (76,771 acres) heads the list, followed by TRAILHEAD (2016) and ROBBERS (2012), on top of 8 total mapped perimeters reaching back to 1910.\n-   **Terrain: 65/100.** Elevation banding alone — 927 metres, inside the WUI/chaparral elevation band — puts a thumb on the scale before vegetation is even counted.\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report: fire history layer listing the Mosquito Fire 2022 at 76,771 acres, Trailhead 2016, Robbers 2012 and Volcano 1960, with 3 fires in the last 20 years and most recent 2022](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/report-fire-history.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Fire history: the layer names the Mosquito Fire (2022, 76,771 acres) as the most recent perimeter reaching this parcel, on top of Trailhead (2016) and Robbers (2012).\n\n![Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report: street-view vision sweep with north and east findings both rated High — heavy fuels near structure, overhanging vegetation, no visible defensible space](/images/wildfire-risk/placer-county/report-vision-sweep.webp)\n\n**Report excerpt** — Vision sweep by direction: north and east views both rate High, with findings like \"heavy fuels near structure\" and \"no visible defensible space.\"\n\nThe FHSZ polygon says \"Very High\" for every parcel on the Foresthill Divide equally. The report says _this_ house has canopy over the roofline and no visible clearance 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 Placer County\n\nPlacer County homeowners feel all of the above through their insurance bill — when they can get one. Since 2022 the pattern across the county's foothill and Divide 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 Placer County homeowners _can actually do_\n\nPlacer County's defensible-space ordinance requires 100 feet of clearance around structures (Zones 1 and 2), plus the state-mandated ember-resistant Zone 0 (0–5 ft) added under Assembly Bill 3074. The county and CAL FIRE co-fund a low-cost residential chipper program to make compliance affordable. Locally, the **Foresthill/Iowa Hill Fire Safe Council** runs the community's Firewise programs, and the county-led **Foresthill Divide Community Protection Project** is building a 138,000-acre network of fuel breaks across state, federal, and private land aimed specifically at protecting Foresthill, Baker Ranch, Iowa Hill, and Michigan Bluff — including a $1.5 million federal grant to assess wildfire risk across 50,000 acres of the Baker Ranch/Shirttail Canyon area.\n\nAnnual review is the rule, not the exception: vegetation regrows every season, and a parcel that passed inspection in 2024 is not necessarily compliant in 2026.\n\nSet next to this site's [El Dorado County page](/wildfire-risk/california/el-dorado-county/), the two Sierra foothill communities share the same ridge-and-canyon trap geography and a recent megafire apiece — but their access pictures are opposites. Grizzly Flats' fastest modelled fire-truck response is 32 minutes from a station 22.8 kilometres out, with a roughly 20-metre single-point-of-failure chokepoint on its exit network. Foresthill's fastest response is **6.9 minutes** from an in-town station 4.1 kilometres out, and the same route analysis found **no bottleneck at all** across its 11 exits. The hazard zone, the fuel, and the fire history read similarly Very High on both pages — the variable that actually separates them is whether the community has its own fire station on the ridge.\n\nCoverage\n\n## ZIP codes we cover in Placer County\n\nSatelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in Placer 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\n95631\n\nForesthill\n\nMosquito Fire (2022); Foresthill Road case study\n\n95713\n\nColfax\n\nI-80 ridge WUI between the American and Bear rivers\n\n95722\n\nMeadow Vista\n\nFoothill WUI below the Foresthill Divide\n\n95602\n\nAuburn\n\nNorth Auburn and American River canyon WUI\n\n95736\n\nWeimar\n\nRidge WUI along the I-80 canyon country\n\n95714\n\nDutch Flat\n\nSierra forest WUI, historic canyon town\n\n95701\n\nAlta\n\nUpper I-80 forest WUI\n\n96145\n\nTahoe City\n\nWest-shore Tahoe basin forest WUI\n\nZIP areas per USPS; Wildland-Urban Interface and Fire Hazard Severity Zone framing per CAL FIRE.\n\nWhere to go next\n\n## Placer County wildfire risk _in context_\n\n[California wildfire risk The statewide picture: FHSZ, county exposure, 2026 season](/wildfire-risk/california/) [El Dorado County wildfire risk Caldor Fire legacy, ridge-canyon WUI, Grizzly Flats case study](/wildfire-risk/california/el-dorado-county/) [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 _Placer County wildfire risk_\n\nIs Placer County a high wildfire risk area?\n\nYes, above the valley floor. The foothill and mountain communities along the Interstate 80 and Foresthill Road corridors — Colfax, Foresthill, Michigan Bluff, Iowa Hill — sit in CAL FIRE High or Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. The 2022 Mosquito Fire, California’s largest fire that year, burned 76,788 acres starting near Foresthill.\n\nWhat was the largest wildfire in Placer County?\n\nThe 2022 Mosquito Fire — 76,788 acres. It ignited near Oxbow Reservoir on the Middle Fork American River, east of Foresthill, on September 6, 2022, forced the evacuation of Foresthill and neighboring communities, burned for 46 days, destroyed 78 structures across Michigan Bluff, Foresthill, and Volcanoville, and crossed the ridge into El Dorado County before full containment on October 22.\n\nIs it safe to live in Foresthill after the Mosquito Fire?\n\nThe hazard classification did not change: Foresthill remains in a CAL FIRE Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and a current Satelife hazard layer for a Foresthill Road address still reads 90/100. The Mosquito Fire’s ignition point at Oxbow Reservoir sits a few miles from town, and the fire history layer for this exact address now lists three fires within 20 years — Mosquito (2022), Trailhead (2016), and Robbers (2012) — evidence of recurring fire activity on the Foresthill Divide, not a one-off event.\n\nHow do I check the fire hazard zone for my Placer 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 Placer 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 Foresthill, CA generated in July 2026 (property report, Foresthill Road; neighborhood analysis, Foresthill 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 Placer County — Foresthill, Auburn, Colfax, or anywhere on the Foresthill Divide — 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."
}