Heber, UT
Heber, UT's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Heber sits at the 95th 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 5,500 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Heber's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 93rd percentile nationally.
Where Heber's buildings actually sit
Heber rates 48.2% Minimal exposure against just 19.9% Direct and 31.9% Indirect — of 5,500 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 5,500 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Heber compares
Heber's risk sits at a similar level relative to Utah (82nd percentile statewide) as it does nationally (95th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Heber ranks 1,495 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,136 by building count (1 is largest). Within Utah alone, it ranks 59 of 326 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Utah on its state page.
Heber and the insurance market
Heber's 95th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Heber's 48.2% 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 Heber's 1,495-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Heber, see the exposure-zones guide.