Gold Hill, OR
Gold Hill wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Gold Hill at the 99th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 649 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 Gold Hill at the 98th percentile, close to its 99th-percentile risk score.
Gold Hill's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 82.9% of Gold Hill's 649 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 17.1% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Gold Hill against the rest of the country
Gold Hill's risk sits at a similar level relative to Oregon (94th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (99th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gold Hill ranks 454 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,213 by building count (1 is largest). Within Oregon alone, it ranks 24 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Oregon on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Gold Hill sits in Oregon, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. Sellers here disclose wildfire-hazard status before closing, the same number this page reports at the 99th national percentile. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Gold Hill's 82.9% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gold Hill's 454-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Gold Hill, see the exposure-zones guide.