Travis County, Texas · 2026

Wildfire risk in Travis County: low flame lengths, very few roads

Our Satelife report for a Steiner Ranch address returns the lowest composite of any Texas county we publish — 27 / 100, with a 0.0% modelled probability of four-foot flames. It also returns the worst road-access layer of the three, and a 4.6-metre single point of failure. The nearest highway is 2.2 km away in a straight line and 28.8 km by road. In 2011 a 162-acre fire here destroyed 23 homes and took seven hours to evacuate.

Get your Travis County wildfire risk PDF → See the Steiner Ranch case study ↓

Satellite locator map headed “Wildfire risk — Travis County, Texas”, with the county boundary outlined, Austin, Lakeway and Jonestown marked, and a flame icon on the 2011 Steiner Ranch fire area west of the city — Travis County on satellite imagery — Austin on the Blackland Prairie to the east, the Balcones Escarpment running diagonally through the county, and the Lake Travis and Lake Austin interface west of the city with the flame icon on the 2011 Steiner Ranch fire area. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

Local context

The fire that made a city of 1.3 million think about evacuation

Travis County is where the Blackland Prairie meets the Edwards Plateau. Austin sits on the prairie side; the western third of the county climbs the Balcones Escarpment into limestone canyons covered in Ashe juniper and live oak, cut by the Colorado River and impounded into Lake Austin and Lake Travis. Almost all of the county's wildfire exposure lives in that western third — and so does a great deal of its most expensive housing.

On 4 September 2011, the same day and the same Tropical Storm Lee wind field that ignited the Bastrop County Complex sixty miles east, fire moved into the Steiner Ranch development west of Austin. By the numbers it was a small incident:

Roughly 162 acres burned.
23 homes destroyed, three more structurally damaged, 28 properties with exterior damage.
More than 300 homes saved, by around 300 firefighters.
A Travis County deputy constable died after helping residents get out.
The evacuation took as long as seven hours to complete.

Seven hours, for 162 acres. That ratio — trivial fire, extraordinary evacuation time — is the whole Travis County story, and it is the thing a hazard map cannot show you. Steiner Ranch was widely described afterwards as having effectively one way out. A second emergency evacuation route was eventually built and opened, more than a decade later.

A fire danger rating sign standing in dry grass and scrub on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, in November 2023 — Fire danger signage on the Austin fringe, November 2023. Source: Slamforeman, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Sources: Texas A&M Forest Service · Travis County ESD / Lake Travis Fire Rescue reporting · contemporaneous Austin news coverage of the September 2011 fires.

Terrain & fuel

Juniper, limestone and water on three sides

Because OpenStreetMap carries no boundary polygon for Steiner Ranch, our community-scale analysis uses Lakeway — the incorporated city about five kilometres west, in the same juniper belt on the same lake. Every community-scale figure on this page is Lakeway's; every parcel-level figure is the Steiner Ranch property's. Lakeway covers 3,919 hectares, gridded into 293 analysis zones.

The LANDFIRE vegetation layer describes the fuel precisely: 45.2% Edwards Plateau Limestone Savanna and Woodland — Ashe juniper and live oak over shallow soil on limestone — with 12.0% open water and roughly 21% developed land. Juniper, known locally as cedar, carries volatile oils and burns hot and fast once cured, which is why it dominates every Hill Country fire briefing. But it is also broken here: by the lake, by bare rock, and by subdivision. The Satelife area vegetation layer for Lakeway reads 25 / 100, and for the Steiner Ranch parcel 31 / 100.

Satellite view of the Lakeway city boundary on the south shore of Lake Travis in Travis County, Texas, showing housing and golf course fairways threaded through dark green Ashe juniper woodland on limestone terrain — Lakeway on current satellite imagery — housing and fairways woven through dark juniper woodland on the south shore of Lake Travis. Imagery © Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics.

The consequence shows up in the federal fire-behaviour model. At the Steiner Ranch parcel the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities conditional flame-length raster returns 0.0% probability of flames over four feet. That is a genuinely low number and we are not going to dress it up: on current fuels, at this specific parcel, the model does not expect a fire that hand crews cannot engage. Terrain scores 40 / 100 on an elevation band of 163 m — a coarse proxy, since the layer has no slope raster at this location, so read it as "foothills" rather than as a canyon-by-canyon assessment.

Evacuation

2.2 kilometres to the highway. Twenty-eight by road.

This section is why the page exists. Satelife's road-access layer rebuilds suppression reach and egress from the current road graph rather than from distance-as-the-crow-flies, and at the Steiner Ranch parcel the two diverge violently:

4.6 msingle point of failure detected on the parcel's road network

2.2 → 28.8 kmnearest highway: straight-line distance, then actual road distance

17fire stations within the 15 km search radius

21–36 minmodelled road drive-times from named nearby stations

Read that second tile twice. Bee Caves Road is 2.2 km away in a straight line and 28.8 km — a modelled 32 minutes — by road, because the direct line crosses water. Lake Travis Fire Rescue Station 603 sits 3.0 km from the parcel and models at 29.3 minutes. Lakeway Fire Station 602 is 6.0 km away and models at 26.0 minutes. The fastest modelled approach in the whole set, from an unnamed station 5.6 km out, is 9.4 minutes. Seventeen stations within fifteen kilometres, and the water between them and you turns nearly all of them into long drives.

That is what produces a road-access layer of 45 / 100 — the worst single layer in the Steiner Ranch report, and worse than the corresponding layer at either Tahitian Village or Fritch, which both score 10. It is also, quantitatively, the 2011 evacuation: seven hours is what happens when a peninsula full of houses empties through a network whose redundancy score is 1.

At community scale Lakeway looks healthier — 52 independent road exits across 293 zones, 5.6 zones per exit, a fastest modelled engine time of 2.8 minutes from Lakeway Fire Station 602 with five stations in range. But its hotspot zones still model at 11.4 to 11.9 minutes, and its network narrows to a 25.5-metre point. Better than Steiner Ranch; not comfortable.

Exposure

The layer that is low is not the layer that matters

Travis County inverts the usual reading of a Satelife composite. In Hutchinson County the score is high because the fuel is loaded and the model says so. Here the score is 27 / 100 because three of the eight layers — hazard, fire history and fire-spread — read very low, and the one that reads worst is the one no zone map contains.

0.0%modelled probability of flame lengths over 4 ft

5fire-history layer — no mapped perimeters at this parcel

45road-access layer — the report's worst, and its real finding

72AI vision read of the parcel — the report's highest layer

The fire-history layer deserves a caveat rather than a conclusion. It reads mapped NIFC and WFIGS perimeters, and it finds none at this parcel — but the 2011 Steiner Ranch fire, at 162 acres and under local jurisdiction, is not in the certified national perimeter set. A 5 / 100 fire-history score at this address means "no federally mapped perimeter here", not "this place has never burned". It has, within living memory, fatally.

Everything that makes Travis County's wildfire problem serious — a metro population, a lake-fragmented road network, seven-hour evacuations — sits in the two layers a hazard map has no way of scoring. The composite is 27. The finding is 45.

Case study

One address on Quinlan Park Road, scored today

We ran a full Satelife wildfire-risk report for a property on South Quinlan Park Road, Austin TX 78732 — the spine road of Steiner Ranch, inside the area that burned in 2011. The composite: 27 / 100 — Moderate tier, at 0.78 confidence, from eight independently-scored and weighted layers.

Excerpt from a Satelife wildfire risk report for South Quinlan Park Road, Austin: per-layer contributions showing Vision (imagery) 72, Fire Weather 59, Road access 45, Terrain 40, Vegetation/fuel 31, Hazard 16, Fire-spread sim 5 and Fire history 5, each with its weight — **Report excerpt** — Per-layer contributions, Satelife Wildfire Risk Report, South Quinlan Park Road, Austin TX 78732 (July 2026). Composite 27/100, Moderate tier, scored under the United States (usa_generic) adapter.

What drives the score:

AI vision analysis: 72/100 — the report's highest layer. The model reads the parcel's own aerial and street-level imagery: maintained suburban vegetation overall, but ornamental shrubs and trees inside the defensible-space envelope and mature trees close enough to the structure along the frontage and adjacent edges to matter.
Road access: 45/100. Seventeen stations in range, a 4.6-metre chokepoint, and a highway that is 2.2 km away and 28.8 km by road.
Fire weather: 59/100. Thirty-year ERA5 climatology of the Canadian Fire Weather Index.
Hazard: 16/100, weight 30%. Backfilled from the USFS WRC model, because Texas publishes no fire-hazard-severity zone map. Carrying the largest weight in the report at the lowest value, it is the single biggest reason the composite reads 27.
Fire history: 5/100, weight 20%. No mapped national perimeters at this parcel — see the caveat above.

A house on the road that took seven hours to evacuate in 2011 scores 27 / 100, because half the composite's weight sits in two layers that record what has been federally mapped rather than what a fire would actually do to this street. Read the layers, not the headline.

The mitigation plan the report generates for this parcel is the standard pair — audit defensible space annually before fire season, and verify access-route width and gate clearance. In Steiner Ranch the second one is not boilerplate. It is the same 4.6-metre measurement, restated at the scale of a driveway.

Insurance & real estate

High-value housing, no disclosure obligation

The western Travis County interface — Steiner Ranch, Lakeway, Bee Cave, West Lake Hills, River Place — is some of the most expensive residential property in Texas, and none of it comes with a wildfire disclosure. Texas publishes no fire-hazard-severity zone map, so the Texas Property Code §5.008 Seller's Disclosure Notice has no wildfire designation to ask about, and Texas is a non-disclosure state for sale prices on top of that. A buyer doing wildfire diligence here is starting from nothing the state hands them.

Nor is there a mitigation-discount mandate: Texas has no equivalent of California's SB 1060, so premium credit for defensible space and home hardening is a carrier-by-carrier underwriting decision. The fallback if the admitted market declines you is the Texas FAIR Plan Association, the residential insurer of last resort administered under the Texas Department of Insurance, which requires denial by at least two carriers actively writing in Texas before you are eligible.

For a $1M-plus canyon-side property, the practical implication is that the diligence has to be bought rather than looked up. A parcel-level report that dates the vegetation, the structure and — in this county especially — the access geometry is the document that substitutes for the hazard map Texas does not print.

Sources: Texas Department of Insurance · Texas FAIR Plan Association · Texas Property Code §5.008.

Risk reduction

What Travis County homeowners can actually do

The defensible-space zones still apply — Zone 0 in the first five feet, Zone 1 out to thirty, Zone 2 to a hundred — and in juniper the highest-value work is removing the ladder fuel and the ornamental shrubs sitting against the wall that the vision layer flagged at 72 / 100. But this county's distinctive lever is not vegetation. It is knowing your route before you need it: which of your neighbourhood's exits exist, which one is the 4.6-metre one, and what the staged evacuation plan for your section actually says. Austin–Travis County and the ESD fire departments publish those plans; the second Steiner Ranch evacuation route exists because residents pushed for a decade after 2011.

Set against our other Texas pages the contrast is clean. Steiner Ranch: composite 27 / 100, four-foot flame probability 0.0%, road access 45, 4.6-metre chokepoint. Tahitian Village, Bastrop County: 46 / 100, 28.1%, road access 10, one approach route, 30.7-metre chokepoint. Fritch, Hutchinson County: 59 / 100, 71.0%, road access 10, one fire station at 1.2 minutes. Fritch has the fuel problem, Bastrop has the reloading-fuel-plus-one-road problem, and Travis County has the cleanest fuel and the worst roads — with by far the most people behind them.

Coverage

ZIP codes we cover in Travis County

Satelife runs address-level wildfire reports across every ZIP code in Travis County. The ZIPs below are the Balcones Escarpment juniper and 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.

ZIP code	Community	Why it is on the map
78732	Austin (Steiner Ranch)	Quinlan Park Road case study; 2011 fire, lake-bounded access
78734	Austin (Lakeway)	Community case study; Ashe juniper WUI on Lake Travis
78738	Austin (Bee Cave / Lakeway West)	Fast-growing interface along Highway 71
78645	Leander (north Lake Travis)	Jonestown and the lake’s northern shore subdivisions
78669	Spicewood	West-county interface; 2011 Pedernales Bend fire area
78733	Austin (Bee Creek)	Barton Creek greenbelt canyons inside the city
78746	Austin (West Lake Hills)	Dense housing in steep juniper canyon terrain
78730	Austin (River Place)	Bull Creek canyon WUI north of the river
78736	Austin (Oak Hill)	Southwest interface where suburb meets juniper

ZIP areas per USPS. Texas publishes no statewide fire hazard severity zone map; Wildland-Urban Interface framing per Texas A&M Forest Service.

Where to go next

Travis County wildfire risk in context

Texas wildfire risk The statewide picture: no hazard map, three fire regimes, 2026 season Bastrop County wildfire risk Lost Pines, the 2011 Complex Fire, Tahitian Village case study Hutchinson County wildfire risk Panhandle grassland, Smokehouse Creek, Fritch case study Los Angeles County, California The other big-metro interface: Malibu and the Palisades Create a wildfire evacuation plan Zones, egress routes, refuge areas How Satelife calculates wildfire risk Data sources, score composition, honest limits Run a wildfire risk report PDF + score + mitigation plan

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about Travis County wildfire risk

Is wildfire actually a risk in Austin and Travis County?

The fuel is thinner than the Texas headline counties, and the exposure is far larger. A Satelife report for a Steiner Ranch address returns 27 / 100 in the Moderate tier, with the USFS model putting the probability of flame lengths over four feet at 0.0%. But the same report scores road access at 45 / 100 — its worst layer, and worse than either Bastrop or Hutchinson County — and detects a 4.6-metre single point of failure on the road network. In Travis County the binding constraint is not flame length. It is how many people are behind how few roads.

What happened in the 2011 Steiner Ranch fire?

On 4 September 2011 — the same day and the same weather system that started the Bastrop County Complex — fire moved through the Steiner Ranch development west of Austin. It burned roughly 162 acres and destroyed 23 homes, with three more structurally damaged and 28 properties suffering exterior damage; more than 300 homes were saved by about 300 firefighters, and a Travis County deputy constable died after helping residents escape. The evacuation took as long as seven hours to complete.

Why does a small fire matter more here than a big one elsewhere?

Because of the road geometry. From the Steiner Ranch parcel we scored, the nearest highway is 2.2 km away in a straight line — and 28.8 km, or a modelled 32 minutes, by road. Seventeen fire stations sit within the 15 km search radius, yet the fastest modelled approach from a named station is 9.4 minutes and several are over 25 minutes. A 162-acre fire in that geometry is a bigger operational problem than a 2,000-acre fire on a grid.

What kind of vegetation burns in the Texas Hill Country?

Ashe juniper and live oak over limestone — the LANDFIRE layer classifies 45.2% of the Lakeway area as Edwards Plateau Limestone Savanna and Woodland. Juniper carries volatile oils and burns hot and fast when cured, which is why the local name for it, "cedar", turns up in every Hill Country fire briefing. The Satelife area vegetation layer for Lakeway reads 25 / 100 — real fuel, but discontinuous, broken up by lake, rock and development.

Has anything been fixed since 2011?

Yes, and it took over a decade. Steiner Ranch was widely described after 2011 as having effectively one way out; a second emergency evacuation route was subsequently built and opened. That is the correct category of fix for this county — the exposure here is answered with road capacity and staged evacuation planning far more than with fuel treatment.

Scores and evacuation figures on this page are drawn from Satelife wildfire-risk reports generated on 25 July 2026 under the United States (usa_generic) adapter: a property report for South Quinlan Park Road, Austin TX 78732, and a community analysis of the Lakeway city boundary. The two case studies are different places — OpenStreetMap carries no boundary polygon for Steiner Ranch, so community-scale figures are Lakeway's and are labelled as such throughout. Texas publishes no statewide fire-hazard-severity map, so the hazard layer is backfilled from the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model; the fire-history layer reads mapped NIFC/WFIGS perimeters and does not include the 2011 Steiner Ranch fire, whose figures here come from Texas A&M Forest Service and contemporaneous reporting. Drive-times are modelled on OSM-mapped stations and the current road graph. Satelife reports are informational decision support — not a substitute for official evacuation orders, state or federal hazard determinations, or an insurer's underwriting judgement.