Fort Payne, AL
How exposed is Fort Payne to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Fort Payne at the 82nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 7,929 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Fort Payne at the 85th percentile, close to its 82nd-percentile risk score.
Where Fort Payne's buildings actually sit
Of Fort Payne's 7,929 counted buildings, 55% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first. At 7,929 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Fort Payne compares
Fort Payne scores 82nd nationally and 81st 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, Fort Payne ranks 5,754 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,136 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 114 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Fort Payne and the insurance market
Fort Payne's 82nd-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.
Hardening a home in Fort Payne
Fort Payne's 55% 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 Fort Payne's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,929 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Fort Payne. The exposure-zones guide covers what Fort Payne's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.