Bethlehem, PA
Bethlehem wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Bethlehem lands at the 23rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 20,766 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Bethlehem at the 22nd national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Bethlehem's building exposure, zone by zone
Bethlehem rates 66.7% Minimal exposure against just 9.9% Direct and 23.4% Indirect — of 20,766 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 20,766 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Bethlehem ranks
Bethlehem scores 23rd nationally and 26th within Pennsylvania — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bethlehem ranks 24,186 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 676 by building count (1 is largest). Within Pennsylvania alone, it ranks 1,464 of 1,991 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Pennsylvania on its state page.
Bethlehem and the insurance market
Bethlehem's moderate wildfire rating (23rd 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
Bethlehem's 66.7% 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
Bethlehem's 23rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bethlehem, see the exposure-zones guide.