Harding-Birch Lakes, AK
How exposed is Harding-Birch Lakes to wildfire?
Harding-Birch Lakes sits at the 99th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 442 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Harding-Birch Lakes at the 98th percentile, close to its 99th-percentile risk score.
Harding-Birch Lakes's building exposure, zone by zone
Direct exposure dominates in Harding-Birch Lakes: 78.5% of its 442 buildings, versus 14.3% Indirect and 7.2% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
Where Harding-Birch Lakes ranks
There's little gap between Harding-Birch Lakes's 99th national percentile and its 98th percentile inside Alaska, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Harding-Birch Lakes ranks 396 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 18,410 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alaska alone, it ranks 9 of 322 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alaska on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Harding-Birch Lakes
Harding-Birch Lakes's 99th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 78.5% of Harding-Birch Lakes in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Harding-Birch Lakes's 396-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Harding-Birch Lakes, see the exposure-zones guide.