Albany, OR
Albany wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Albany lands at the 9th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 21,278 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Albany at the 11th percentile, close to its 9th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Albany rates 71.3% Minimal exposure against just 4.2% Direct and 24.5% Indirect — of 21,278 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 21,278 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Albany compares
There's little gap between Albany's 9th national percentile and its 2nd percentile inside Oregon, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Albany ranks 28,694 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 654 by building count (1 is largest). Within Oregon alone, it ranks 411 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Oregon on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Albany's 9th-percentile score lands in Oregon, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. Oregon's own hazard map feeds directly into that disclosure requirement. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Hardening a home in Albany
Even with 71.3% of Albany outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 21,278 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Albany. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Albany, see the exposure-zones guide.