Buffalo, MN
Buffalo wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Buffalo at the 36th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 5,766 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Buffalo at the 34th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Buffalo's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 82.9% of Buffalo's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 12.4% Direct and 4.8% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 5,766 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Buffalo ranks
There's little gap between Buffalo's 36th national percentile and its 46th percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Buffalo ranks 20,326 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,000 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 494 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Buffalo and the insurance market
Buffalo's moderate wildfire rating (36th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Buffalo's 82.9% 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.
More on how this number was built
Buffalo's 36th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Buffalo, see the exposure-zones guide.