Wildfire risk
Wildfire spread and risk, modeled on your own ground
Most wildfire risk maps stop at the county. FUELBREAK runs the model at the scale you actually make decisions on — your parcel, your slope, your fuels, today's weather.
Fire behavior is driven by three things: fuel, weather and topography. National risk layers average all three across areas far larger than any decision you'd make about your own land. A rating of "high" across a whole county tells you nothing about which side of your driveway to clear first.
FUELBREAK runs surface spread and risk calculations against the terrain and fuel conditions where you're standing. You get rate of spread, direction and relative exposure resolved to the parcel, not the zip code.
What it models
- Rate of spread and direction from slope, aspect, wind and the fuel model on the ground.
- Relative exposure across a parcel, so you can see which approach carries the most risk.
- Terrain effects — fire moves uphill fast, and a chimney or saddle behaves differently from a flat.
- Current conditions, not annual averages. The same slope behaves differently in June than in October.
Who uses it
- Landowners deciding where to spend a limited mitigation budget.
- Foresters and consultants producing defensible recommendations for clients.
- Fire districts and mitigation specialists doing parcel-level assessment at scale.
- Anyone buying property in the wildland-urban interface who wants to know what they're taking on.
How it fits with everything else
- Every Sensaro app writes to the same records. A beetle report filed from a ridge in the morning changes the fuel picture the risk model uses that afternoon.
- Beetle reports filed in PineBeetle CO and mitigation tracked in SATYR show up here as changed conditions.
Common questions
How do I find out the wildfire risk for my property?
Public risk maps are usually modeled at county or watershed scale, which is too coarse to act on. FUELBREAK runs the calculation against your parcel's own slope, aspect and fuel conditions, so the output reflects your ground rather than a regional average.
What is rate of spread, and why does it matter more than a risk score?
Rate of spread is how fast a fire front moves through a given fuel type under current wind and slope conditions, usually expressed in chains or feet per hour. It matters more than a category label because it tells you how much time you have and which direction the pressure comes from — the two things that determine where mitigation actually helps.
Does slope really change fire behavior that much?
Yes, more than almost anything else in the model. Fire moves substantially faster uphill because flames preheat the fuel above them. A slope that looks unremarkable on a map can be the reason one side of a property burns and the other doesn't.
Is FUELBREAK free?
There's a free tier you can run on your own property. It's on the App Store and Google Play, and there's a browser version if you'd rather not install anything.
Can I use it without a signal in the field?
The app works offline for capture and recalculates when it reconnects, so a parcel assessed out of coverage records normally.