Anthem, AZ
Anthem, AZ's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Anthem at the 84th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 9,035 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Anthem at the 81st percentile, close to its 84th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Indirect exposure is dominant in Anthem (93.9% of 9,035 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 6.1% sit in the Direct zone. At 9,035 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Anthem against the rest of the country
Inside Arizona, Anthem sits at just the 52nd percentile even though it scores 84th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Anthem ranks 5,124 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,834 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 212 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Anthem and the insurance market
Anthem's 84th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Anthem's 93.9% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Anthem's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Anthem's 5,124-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Anthem's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.