Forest Lake, MN
How exposed is Forest Lake to wildfire?
USFS scores Forest Lake at the 57th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 7,769 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Forest Lake at the 52nd national percentile — 5 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Forest Lake's buildings actually sit
7,769 buildings are counted in Forest Lake, and 50.6% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 43.7% rated Minimal. At 7,769 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Forest Lake compares
Forest Lake's 83rd-percentile standing inside Minnesota outpaces its 57th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Forest Lake ranks 13,615 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,190 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 157 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 57th national percentile, Forest Lake rates elevated for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Forest Lake's 50.6% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Forest Lake's 13,615-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Forest Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.