Downieville-Lawson-Dumont, CO
How exposed is Downieville-Lawson-Dumont to wildfire?
USFS scores Downieville-Lawson-Dumont at the 96th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 329 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Downieville-Lawson-Dumont at the 94th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's building exposure, zone by zone
73.9% of Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's 329 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 243 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 26.1% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 0% are Minimal.
How Downieville-Lawson-Dumont compares
There's little gap between Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's 96th national percentile and its 86th percentile inside Colorado, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Downieville-Lawson-Dumont ranks 1,191 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 20,843 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 69 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's 96th-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
Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's 73.9% 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.
Where Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's 1,191-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Downieville-Lawson-Dumont's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.