Holyoke, MA
Holyoke, MA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Holyoke at the 26th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 10,297 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Holyoke at the 23rd national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Holyoke's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Holyoke's buildings (50.9%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 10,297 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Holyoke against the rest of the country
Compare Holyoke's two percentiles: 50th within Massachusetts, only 26th nationally — a gap of 24 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Holyoke ranks 23,320 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,555 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 125 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Holyoke
Holyoke's moderate wildfire rating (26th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Holyoke (50.9% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Holyoke's 23,320-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Holyoke, see the exposure-zones guide.