Bangor, ME
How exposed is Bangor to wildfire?
Bangor's 12,640 buildings earn a 9th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Bangor at the 9th percentile, close to its 9th-percentile risk score.
Bangor's building exposure, zone by zone
55.6% of Bangor's 12,640 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 17.6% Direct and 26.8% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone. At 12,640 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Bangor compares
Bangor's 39th-percentile standing inside Maine outpaces its 9th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bangor ranks 28,710 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,210 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maine alone, it ranks 95 of 155 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maine on its state page.
Bangor and the insurance market
Bangor's low wildfire rating (9th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 55.6% of Bangor'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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,640 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Bangor. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Bangor, see the exposure-zones guide.