Brainerd, MN
How exposed is Brainerd to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Brainerd at the 62nd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 6,556 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Brainerd at the 59th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Indirect exposure is dominant in Brainerd (70.6% of 6,556 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 14.8% sit in the Direct zone. At 6,556 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Brainerd ranks
Compare Brainerd's two percentiles: 87th within Minnesota, only 62nd nationally — a gap of 26 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Brainerd ranks 12,100 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,646 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 118 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Brainerd and the insurance market
Brainerd's 62nd-percentile, 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Brainerd's 70.6% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Brainerd's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Brainerd's 12,100-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Brainerd's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.