Ashland, WI
Ashland, WI's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Ashland sits at the 28th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,023 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Ashland's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 30th percentile nationally.
Where Ashland's buildings actually sit
USFS puts 84.6% of Ashland's 5,023 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 14.6% Direct and 0.8% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 5,023 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Ashland ranks
Compare Ashland's two percentiles: 57th within Wisconsin, only 28th nationally — a gap of 29 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ashland ranks 22,704 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,417 by building count (1 is largest). Within Wisconsin alone, it ranks 338 of 808 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Wisconsin on its state page.
Ashland and the insurance market
Ashland's moderate wildfire rating (28th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 84.6% of Ashland's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Ashland's 28th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Ashland, see the exposure-zones guide.