Calaveras County, CA Fire Regulations: Wildfire Zones (2026)

Calaveras County sits in the Sierra Nevada foothills and treats defensible space as a local obligation rather than leaving it purely to the state. 010, which adopts Public Resources Code Chapter 3, sections 4291 through 4299, the state defensible space requirements, and applies them to any person who owns, leases, controls, operates or maintains a building or structure in, upon or adjoining any mountainous area, forest-covered land, brush-covered land, grass-covered land, or any land of that character. The adoption was made by Ordinance No. 3078 on February 14, 2017.

WHY THE ADOPTION MATTERS RATHER THAN JUST THE STATE LAW: sections 4291 to 4299 are state requirements enforced primarily by CAL FIRE, but by adopting them into the county code the Board of Supervisors made them enforceable as a county ordinance too, through county enforcement channels. The trigger is also broader than people expect, it is not limited to a mapped hazard zone but reaches any structure in or ADJOINING mountainous, forest, brush or grass-covered land, which in Calaveras County covers most developed property. Note what this chapter does NOT do: it does not set county-specific clearance distances, and it does not itself designate Fire Hazard Severity Zones.

Those zones are mapped by CAL FIRE under state law, and the specific clearance distances come from the Public Resources Code sections the county has adopted, not from a separate county standard. The county also makes climatic findings supporting its building code amendments, Express Finding Number 1 records that the county climate lies in a transitional zone between the Sierra Nevada and the San Joaquin Valley and varies significantly by geography, which is the formal basis for local amendments to the California Building Standards Code.