Cottonwood Heights, UT
Cottonwood Heights wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Cottonwood Heights lands at the 98th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 12,492 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Cottonwood Heights at the 95th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Cottonwood Heights rates 63.5% Minimal exposure against just 4% Direct and 32.5% Indirect — of 12,492 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 12,492 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Cottonwood Heights against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Cottonwood Heights's 98th national percentile and its 93rd percentile inside Utah, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cottonwood Heights ranks 708 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,234 by building count (1 is largest). Within Utah alone, it ranks 24 of 326 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Utah on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Cottonwood Heights
At the 98th percentile nationally, Cottonwood Heights carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Cottonwood Heights's 63.5% 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.
Where Cottonwood Heights's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Cottonwood Heights's 708-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Cottonwood Heights's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.