Bylas, AZ
Bylas wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Bylas at the 95th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 607 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Bylas at the 96th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Bylas's buildings actually sit
Of Bylas's 607 counted buildings, 74.1% 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.
Where Bylas ranks
Bylas's 95th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 74th ranking inside Arizona does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 21 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bylas ranks 1,690 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,724 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 116 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Bylas's 95th-percentile, very 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Bylas's 74.1% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Bylas's 95th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Bylas, see the exposure-zones guide.