Bay City, MI
Bay City, MI's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Bay City's 16,176 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 Bay City at the 9th percentile, close to its 9th-percentile risk score.
Bay City's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 99% of Bay City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.9% Direct and 0.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 16,176 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Bay City ranks
Bay City's 27th-percentile standing inside Michigan 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, Bay City ranks 28,810 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 899 by building count (1 is largest). Within Michigan alone, it ranks 546 of 745 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Michigan on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Bay City
Bay City'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.
Hardening a home in Bay City
With 99% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Bay City gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bay City's 28,810-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bay City, see the exposure-zones guide.