Gates, TN
How exposed is Gates to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Gates at the 17th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 342 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Gates at the 17th national percentile — 0 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
Gates rates 62% Minimal exposure against just 32.2% Direct and 5.9% Indirect — of 342 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Gates compares
Gates scores 17th nationally and 4th within Tennessee — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gates ranks 26,263 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 20,535 by building count (1 is largest). Within Tennessee alone, it ranks 480 of 502 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Tennessee on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Gates
At the 17th national percentile, Gates rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Hardening a home in Gates
Gates's 62% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gates's 26,263-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Gates, see the exposure-zones guide.