Black Hawk, CO
Black Hawk, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Black Hawk's 192 buildings earn a 97th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Black Hawk at the 95th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Black Hawk's buildings actually sit
78.7% of Black Hawk's 192 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 151 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 21.4% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 0% are Minimal.
Where Black Hawk ranks
There's little gap between Black Hawk's 97th national percentile and its 87th percentile inside Colorado, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Black Hawk ranks 1,067 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,152 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 63 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Black Hawk's 97th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Black Hawk's 78.7% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Black Hawk's 1,067-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Black Hawk, see the exposure-zones guide.