Chelsea, MA
How exposed is Chelsea to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Chelsea at the 7th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 4,534 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Chelsea at the 5th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Chelsea's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 100% of Chelsea's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Chelsea against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Chelsea's 7th national percentile and its 0th percentile inside Massachusetts, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Chelsea ranks 29,307 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,765 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 247 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 7th national percentile, Chelsea rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Hardening a home in Chelsea
Chelsea's 100% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Chelsea's 29,307-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Chelsea, see the exposure-zones guide.