Alpena, MI
How exposed is Alpena to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Alpena at the 19th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 5,541 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Alpena at the 18th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Alpena's buildings (64.5% of 5,541) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 5,541 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Alpena compares
Within Michigan, Alpena ranks higher (64th percentile) than it does nationally (19th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Alpena ranks 25,466 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,111 by building count (1 is largest). Within Michigan alone, it ranks 268 of 745 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Michigan on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Alpena
At the 19th national percentile, Alpena rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Alpena's 64.5% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Alpena's 25,466-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Alpena, see the exposure-zones guide.