Dauphin Island, AL
How exposed is Dauphin Island to wildfire?
USFS scores Dauphin Island at the 89th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 2,155 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Dauphin Island at the 86th percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
Where Dauphin Island's buildings actually sit
74.3% of Dauphin Island's 2,155 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 25.7% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
Where Dauphin Island ranks
Dauphin Island scores 89th nationally and 95th 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, Dauphin Island ranks 3,516 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,051 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 28 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Dauphin Island and the insurance market
Dauphin Island's 89th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 74.3% of Dauphin Island outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Dauphin Island's 3,516-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Dauphin Island, see the exposure-zones guide.