Brighton, CO
Brighton wildfire risk explained
Brighton sits at the 61st percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 13,401 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Brighton at the 61st national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Brighton rates 93.3% Minimal exposure against just 6.6% Direct and 0.1% Indirect — of 13,401 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 13,401 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Brighton against the rest of the country
Brighton's 61st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 28th ranking inside Colorado does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 32 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Brighton ranks 12,441 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,132 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 339 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Brighton and the insurance market
Brighton's 61st-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
With 93.3% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Brighton 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 Brighton's 12,441-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Brighton, see the exposure-zones guide.