Hawthorne, NJ
How exposed is Hawthorne to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Hawthorne at the 19th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 6,319 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Hawthorne's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 20th percentile nationally.
Where Hawthorne's buildings actually sit
Hawthorne rates 85.8% Minimal exposure against just 10.9% Direct and 3.3% Indirect — of 6,319 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 6,319 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Hawthorne compares
There's little gap between Hawthorne's 19th national percentile and its 5th percentile inside New Jersey, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hawthorne ranks 25,410 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,743 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Jersey alone, it ranks 667 of 700 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Jersey on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Hawthorne
Hawthorne's low rating (19th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 85.8% of Hawthorne outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Hawthorne's 19th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Hawthorne, see the exposure-zones guide.