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Cal Fire’s new fire hazard map expands ‘very high’ zones across Lake County; local officials express concern
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County officials have continued to raise concerns about a new fire hazard map released by Cal Fire that has determined that thousands more acres of the county are at a higher fire threat.
On Feb. 10, Cal Fire released its new fire hazard severity zone map for “Local Responsibility Areas,” adding a total of 14,000 acres of Lake County land to the 'very high' fire hazard severity zone.
State law defines Local Responsibility Areas, or LRA, as “Areas of the state in which the financial responsibility of preventing and suppressing fires is the primary responsibility of a city, county, city and county, or district.”
The new map has entered a 90-day public comment period that began Feb. 12 and ends May 13.
Local governments are required to adopt the map by ordinance in 120 days; their deadline is July 1.
County and city officials, however, fear the new map could have major implications for the county, particularly in relation to fire insurance. They also have questioned the fact that the ratings on the map cannot be altered, regardless of local mitigation efforts.
This is not the first time that Lake County has dealt with concerns about the fire hazard severity zone map.
The Office of the State Fire Marshal is required by law to classify both the state and local responsibility areas into moderate, high and very high fire hazard severity zones.
In April 2024, the updated mapping for State Responsibility Areas went into effect, despite local opposition expressed during the public hearing at the Lake County Board of Supervisors meeting.
Then, in December, local officials — including supervisors, fire chiefs and city managers — were informed that the updated map for the LRA would soon be rolled out.
Regarding how federal lands might be impacted, the Bureau of Land Management said it coordinates with Cal Fire on wildland fire management throughout California and is jointly part of the California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force, “working together to prevent catastrophic wildfires and manage healthy lands.”
“We defer to Cal Fire for more information about new fire hazard severity maps,” the agency told Lake County News about its involvement in the process.
‘Very high’ category significantly expanded
The release of the new LRA map marks its first update since 2011.
Compared to the 2011 version, this new map significantly expands the “very high” acreage in Lake County.
In Clearlake, the acreage rated as “very high” increases from 1,583 to 4,054 acres. In Lakeport, it rises from zero to 603 acres.
Meanwhile, unincorporated areas under county jurisdiction see the most dramatic jump, from just 5 acres to 10,881 acres.
Overall, the total acreage classified as "very high" has grown by 13,950 acres — from 1,588 to 15,538 acres — a total increase of approximately 878%.
In addition, the 2011 map was only required to show the “very high” category. The new map, however, also displays local areas rated moderate and high.
In December 2022, Cal Fire released an updated map for State Responsibility Areas or the SRA, classifying 366,812 acres in Lake County as "very high" fire hazard zones, accounting for 92% of the total acreage under SRA.
Lake County did not welcome it.
In January 2023, during a Cal Fire public hearing at a Lake County Board of Supervisors meeting, local officials, including supervisors and Lakeport Fire Chief Patrick Reitz, and the public voiced opposition, citing concerns about the map’s methodology and potential impacts on fire insurance.
Despite unanimous criticism during the meeting, Cal Fire proceeded with adoption in April 2024.
The purpose of the maps
Cal Fire said these maps assess long-term fire hazard potential statewide and are designed for governance purposes.
California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara also claimed that the maps are intended to “drive local planning decisions, not insurance decisions.”
“Fires are real,” said District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier, acknowledging the necessity for Lake County to mitigate fire risks. “So we need to do good work to prevent fires from happening.”
However, local officials remain concerned about the map’s impact on fire insurance availability and rates in the already strained local market, particularly given Lara's recent policy that allows insurance companies to utilize “catastrophic models’ in setting rates.
“It’s not pragmatic for people who are living here,” said Sabatier of the map. “This is gonna have a huge impact."
“The fear is that it's just going to make insurability in the city much more difficult,” said Clearlake City Manager Alan Flora.
While the public comment period is underway, local government and fire leaders also are raising concerns about the mandatory and restrictive adoption process of the map.
Local governments must adopt the map as is or with a higher hazard severity rating, regardless of public input or fire mitigation efforts.
“It's kind of the state jamming this down everybody's throat,” said Reitz before the map was rolled out during a Lakeport Fire District board meeting in January.
A Feb. 12 county press release confirmed that local jurisdictions must approve the map by ordinance before July 1. It also stated that state government code does not allow any adjustment to a lower rating in the map.
The public can now direct questions about the maps to the Office of the State Fire Marshal at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by calling 916-633-7655.
Public comment can be submitted to the county and two city councils:
• City of Clearlake: 14050 Olympic Drive, Clearlake. Email comments that apply within the city of Clearlake to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call City Manager Alan Flora at 707-994-8201.
• City of Lakeport: 225 Park St., Lakeport. Email comments that apply within the city of Lakeport to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call City Manager Kevin Ingram at 707-263-5615, Extension 102.
• County of Lake: 255 N Forbes St., Lakeport, Third Floor, Community Development Department. Email comments for County Jurisdiction areas to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call Director Mireya Turner at 707-263-2382.
Public comment will close on May 13, according to Lake County Community Development Director Mireya.
The Lake County Board of Supervisors, City Councils of Lakeport and Clearlake will also host public hearings on the map. Exact dates have not yet been announced.
Detailed maps for the three jurisdictions in Lake County can be found here. More information can be found on Cal Fire’s webpage, under the “Local Responsibility Area Fire Hazard Severity Zone Map” tab.
Concerns raised over map’s modeling method
For the map makers, the fire hazard severity zone maps are intended to reduce fire threat by ensuring building code compliance.
According to Cal Fire, the maps assess fire hazard based on “the physical conditions that create a likelihood and expected fire behavior over a 30 to 50-year period.”
Such long-term projection does not consider mitigation measures such as home hardening, recent wildfire or fuel reduction efforts.
When asked if zone ratings could change based on such efforts, Jim McDougald, assistant deputy director of Cal Fire’s Community Wildfire Planning & Risk Reduction, said it’s unlikely.
“It looks at the long term fire hazard; it’s the landscape and what it looks like,” McDougald told Lake County News. “So very few things change the map.”
Significant changes, he explained, happen only when wildland is developed into urban space. “There can be small changes, but you don’t see drastic changes unless it’s been built out,” he said.
“The only important part is, when people build in the wild land, we want them to build the appropriate mitigations to protect their home and their investment, right?” he said of the map’s intent. “That's what the maps are designed to do.”
“It's designed for where there's a hazard and where you need to have these building mitigations or defensible space,” he added.
But for Supervisor Sabatier, the problem is that such work of mitigation “doesn’t have any impacts on this map,” he told Lake County News.
A brief discussion was brought up in the Clearlake City Council’s Feb. 20 meeting about Woodland Community College Lake County campus’ fire mitigation effort after suffering smoke damage from the Boyles Fire that started last September.
Mayor Russ Cremer said that the campus went on to remove all trees and overhangings within five feet of their structures.
But still, that didn’t change the rating on the map.
“They did an enormous amount of work removing vegetation. You would expect that maybe you would get some credit or benefit from this mapping process as a result of that mitigation work,” Flora said during the meeting. “It's not gonna happen.”
As for future updates for the map, McDougald said there is no fixed timeline but estimated it would be “at least five years” before another revision.
“It’s been a long time since we updated them,” said McDougald of the 14 years between now and 2011 when the LRA map was last updated.
Still, Sabatier finds it difficult to reconcile that the map projects fire behavior over decades but is updated far more frequently than every 30 to 50 years.
“If you're going to redo these maps every five years, then why don't you just model five years?” he said. “It would make sense to me to model until the next one.”
Worries over fire insurance
When asked if the insurance companies can make their policies based on the maps, McGourald said, “They’re not supposed to. No.”
He emphasized that the map was designed “strictly around building fire-safe homes — it’s what it's for.”
But local officials worry its real-world impact may extend beyond that intent.
“We knew that folks in the unincorporated area outside of these LRAs were already experiencing some pretty tragic increases, if not complete denial for their home insurance,” said Supervisor Sabatier during a phone interview with Lake County News.
“And this will have a much deeper impact in the residential areas especially,” he added of the new LRA map.
Lakeport City Manager Kevin Ingram pointed to Commissioner Lara’s new regulations announced in December that allow insurers using catastrophic modeling in their decision making.
The policy Ingram referred to is part of the commissioner’s regulation kit of “expanding coverage for Californians in wildfire-distressed areas” which goes “hand-in-hand with forward-looking wildfire catastrophe models that can better predict future rates,” the commissioner’s Dec. 30 press release stated.
The new rules allow insurers to incorporate wildfire catastrophe models into ratemaking, if they also expand coverage in underserved areas.
For Ingram, that means insurance companies can now “utilize a whole plethora of information such as the fire hazard severity mapping in their decision on setting rates,” he wrote in an email to Lake County News.
“We know that the insurance companies were using them,” said Reitz in a preliminary discussion about the map at the Lakeport city council meeting on Feb. 18.
“But now it is absolutely permitted,” he said.
The Department of Insurance has not responded to Lake County News’ multiple inquiries through emails and phone calls since February on the map’s impact on Lake County residents’ insurance options and rates.
An automated voice message when calling the department’s press communication number says, “For the health and safety of our employees, we have limited the number of staff on-site. This line is being regularly monitored and we will return messages.”
For Flora, it's important to “get the word out,” he said in the Clearlake City Council meeting where “very few people” were in the room.
“Unfortunately the community probably is not going to respond or care about this as much as they should until they get a cancellation notice of their insurance, which, if they do nothing, is going to happen,” Flora said.
Adopting the map: A restrictive mandate
Even with the current 90-day public comment period, local officials feel the process is little more than a formality.
For one, public comment won’t change the fact that the county and cities “must” adopt the map, as required by state law.
It’s not by choice, said Flora, who also used the word “restrictive” to describe the lack of flexibility in the map: “We can increase the severity zones, but we can’t decrease them.”
“It is frustrating to be able to do a lot of mitigation work that still does not impact these severity zones,” Flora added.
“If you have ‘moderate,’ you can make a claim — ‘actually, it’s not moderate, it should be high,’” said Sabatier of the rule that he found peculiar. “I don’t know who would ever do it.”
During the Feb. 18 Lakeport City Council meeting, Chief Reitz expressed his frustration.
“We can’t do anything about it,” Reitz said. “They give us a public hearing process that's lip service only, so I don't see why I need to couch my remarks, because the state has basically thrust this down our throats and told us that there's no grounds for appeal.”
When asked about the “appeal” process, “There’s no such thing as appeals,” McDougald of Cal Fire responded in a follow-up call, saying that it’s not a rule created by Cal Fire for the map.
“That’s in government code,” said McDougald, citing Government Code 51179 that restricts local jurisdictions’ adjustment to the rating.
‘Zone 0’ policy
Just before the map was rolled out, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on Feb. 6, directing Cal Fire to “accelerate” its work to adopt a new fire-prevention policy known as “Zone 0” which is tied to the updated LRA map.
Once implemented, Zone 0 will require both new and existing structures in “very high” fire hazard zones on the LRA map to maintain an “ember-resistant zone” within the immediate 5-feet of structures.
For Lake County, it will apply to any structures in the 15,538 acres classified as “very high” by the new map.
It means “no combustible materials within five feet of a home whether it's trees, grass, shrubs, or a fence, mulch, deck,” Flora explained at the Feb. 20 Clearlake City Council meeting. “So there's going to be some pretty significant impact.”
Ingram of Lakeport also expressed concerns at a Feb. 18 Lakeport City Council meeting, noting that it’s unclear how existing structures will meet the strict Zone 0 requirements.
While Ingram said the responsibility for inspections remains uncertain, Flora confirmed that local governments will handle enforcement.
“As the state likes to do, there’s going to be a number of additional regulations that come down,” Flora said during the Clearlake City Council meeting. “We have to enforce them; they are not going to do it.”
Email staff reporter Lingzi Chen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
