Brightwaters, NY
Brightwaters wildfire risk explained
Brightwaters's 1,545 buildings earn a 37th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Brightwaters at the 38th percentile, close to its 37th-percentile risk score.
Brightwaters's building exposure, zone by zone
Brightwaters rates 78.6% Minimal exposure against just 21.4% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 1,545 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Brightwaters compares
Compare Brightwaters's two percentiles: 80th within New York, only 37th nationally — a gap of 43 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Brightwaters ranks 19,795 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,970 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 255 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Brightwaters and the insurance market
At the 37th national percentile, Brightwaters rates moderate for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Brightwaters's 78.6% 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.
Where Brightwaters's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,545 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Brightwaters. The exposure-zones guide covers what Brightwaters's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.