Calera, AL
Calera wildfire risk explained
Calera's 6,763 buildings earn a 81st-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Calera at the 84th national percentile — 3 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Calera's buildings actually sit
Indirect exposure is dominant in Calera (74.1% of 6,763 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 26% sit in the Direct zone. At 6,763 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Calera compares
Calera scores 81st nationally and 77th within Alabama — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Calera ranks 6,069 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,559 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 135 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Calera and the insurance market
Calera's 81st-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.
Hardening a home in Calera
Because 74.1% of Calera's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Calera's 81st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Calera, see the exposure-zones guide.