Brookside, AL
How exposed is Brookside to wildfire?
USFS scores Brookside at the 75th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 676 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Brookside at the 78th percentile, close to its 75th-percentile risk score.
Brookside's building exposure, zone by zone
Of Brookside's 676 counted buildings, 82% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Brookside compares
Brookside's 75th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 57th ranking inside Alabama does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 18 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Brookside ranks 8,023 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,906 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 253 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Brookside's 75th-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.
Hardening a home in Brookside
Because Direct exposure dominates in Brookside (82%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Brookside's 8,023-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Brookside, see the exposure-zones guide.