"Am I in a wildfire zone?" is one of the most reasonable questions a Central Texas homeowner can ask, and it has a frustrating answer: yes, probably, and that fact tells you less about your house than you would hope.

Both halves of that are worth explaining, because the gap between them is where almost all of the useful work lives.

First, the number

The 2026 City of Austin and Travis County Community Wildfire Protection Plan, the CWPP, puts it plainly: 45% of Travis County residents live within the wildland-urban interface. Nearly half the county. The planning area covers about 1,000 square miles across Travis County, the City of Austin, and 26 municipalities.

So if you are asking whether you are in the WUI, the base rate is close to a coin flip, and if you live anywhere on the western side of the county it is considerably higher than that. "Am I in a wildfire zone" turns out to be a question with a fairly boring answer for most people here.

The interesting questions are the next ones.

How to look up your own address

Three public sources, in rough order of how useful they are to a homeowner.

The Texas A&M Forest Service wildfire risk portal (TxWRAP). The state's public-facing wildfire risk explorer. Enter an address and it returns the modeled risk surfaces for that location. This is the same family of data the state and local agencies work from.

The Travis County CWPP. The 2026 plan, currently in draft, contains the county's own quantitative wildfire risk assessment along with the field assessment results broken out by area. It is a long technical document, but the maps in Chapter 3 and the area tables in Appendix C are readable.

Your city or county GIS viewer. Most local jurisdictions publish parcel-level map layers, which will at minimum tell you your fire district, your distance to the nearest station, and the terrain around you.

All three will give you an answer. None of them will give you an answer about your house, and the CWPP is unusually honest about why.

The paragraph most homeowners never read

The county's risk model is called the Quantitative Wildfire Risk Assessment. It is a serious piece of work, modeled under 97th-percentile fire weather, meaning conditions more extreme than roughly 97% of historical days. It produces the burn probability and flame length maps that everyone shares.

It also says this about itself, repeatedly, in its own text:

The assessment should not be interpreted as a property-specific risk determination, insurance rating tool, code compliance assessment, or substitute for an on-site wildfire home assessment.

That is not a lawyer's throat-clearing. It is a statement about resolution. The QWRA is a landscape model. It reasons about vegetation, terrain, weather, and fuel continuity across a thousand square miles. It was never built to say anything about one roof, one deck, or one set of vents.

There is a second limit, and for a homeowner it is the more important one. The plan is explicit that windblown embers are the primary cause of structure ignition, that embers can travel one to two miles ahead of a fire front, and that ember exposure, structure-to-structure spread, and conditions within the home ignition zone are not directly modeled.

Read that together. The main way houses actually catch fire is the thing the map does not model. The map is measuring how a fire moves across a landscape, and most homes are lost to something arriving ahead of it.

Flame length is not a prediction about your house

The other thing worth understanding is what the colors mean, because the flame length map is the one that circulates and it is widely misread.

The CWPP uses the standard fire behavior classes:

Class	Flame length
Very Low	0 to 1 ft
Low	1 to 4 ft
Moderate	4 to 8 ft
High	8 to 12 ft
Very High	12 to 25 ft
Extreme	over 25 ft

In Travis County, the 0 to 4 foot range covers most of the eastern half, where the fuel is grass. The 8 foot and greater category concentrates in the western Hill Country around Lake Travis and in dense eastern woodland.

Here is the misreading. Flame length is an indicator of fire intensity and of how hard a fire is to fight, and the plan stresses that it is not a direct predictor of structure ignition. A short-flame grass fire ignites easily and moves fast; a tall-flame juniper stand is harder to ignite but releases far more heat. Neither number is a statement about whether a particular house survives. That depends on the house.

Two different assessments, deliberately kept apart

The CWPP does something methodologically careful that is worth knowing about, because it explains why two official-looking numbers for the same neighborhood can disagree.

Alongside the computer model, teams did field assessments in April 2026 using a modified NFPA 1144 methodology, the standard for reducing structure ignition hazards. Those produce four hazard bands:

• Slight: 25% to 43.75%
• Moderate: 43.75% to 62.5%
• Significant: 62.5% to 81.25%
• Severe: 81.25% to 100%

And the plan states directly that the map from Chapter 3 does not integrate the field assessment findings, because the two look at different parameters at different scales, and that deviations between them are expected.

So the county runs a landscape model and a ground-level structural assessment, and tells you plainly that they are answering different questions. That is good practice, and it is also the clearest possible signal about where a homeowner should be paying attention.

What the field assessment actually weights

The NFPA 1144 form used in those field assessments scores 22 variables. Two of them carry the heaviest single weight, 25 points each:

• The roof assembly. A Class A roof in good condition scores 0. An unrated roof in poor condition scores the full 25.
• Defensible space. More than 100 feet of it scores 1. Less than 30 feet around the structure scores the full 25.

Everything else, siding, decks and fencing, setback from a slope, road access, utility placement, vegetation type, carries less. Roof and near-home clearance dominate the score.

That is the answer to "what should I actually look at." Not the map. The roof over your head and the first hundred feet around it, which are the two things a homeowner controls and the two things weighted most heavily by the professional standard.

The plan's own field work also found that defensible space gaps were rated Severe in nearly every area assessed. That is a countywide finding about the gap between what the standard asks for and what is actually on the ground.

So what should you do with the map?

Use it for what it is good at. The regional maps tell you about your landscape: the fuels around you, the terrain, the weather pattern, whether your part of the county sits in the higher burn probability bands. That is real context and it is worth knowing.

Then stop asking the map about your house, because it has told you it cannot answer, and go look at the house. Age and condition of the roof. What is growing in the first five feet. Whether the deck is combustible. Where the vents are and what is behind them. Whether there is a clear second way out of the neighborhood. Those are property facts, and the only way to know them is for someone to record them, at your address, on a date.

There is also a data-freshness point worth making. Some of the risk datasets the industry relies on are years old, and none of them are refreshed on the schedule at which a real property changes. A tree comes down. A deck goes on. A roof gets replaced. The landscape model does not know, because it was never watching your lot.

Start with your address

Our address check reads the public hazard record for a location and tells you which perils are actually worth assessing where you live. It is free, it takes a few seconds, and it does not ask for an account, a photo, or a payment.

Check your address

After that, the useful step is a dated record of the property itself: the roof, the first five feet, the vegetation, the vents, the access. Home Health Intel exists to help homeowners build that record and own it, so that the answer to "what is the condition of this specific house?" is a file rather than an inference from a county-scale map.

For evacuation planning specifically, our notes from Austin's August 2026 wildfire town hall cover what city and county officials told homeowners directly.

Home Health Intel documents condition. We are not a public insurance adjuster (TX Ins. Code § 4102). Carrier underwriting decisions belong to your carrier.

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Figures and quoted language in this article come from the 2026 City of Austin and Travis County Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which is a draft document; treat its numbers as provisional. This article is general education, not legal, financial, or insurance advice.