Hoover, AL
How exposed is Hoover to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Hoover lands at the 67th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 29,503 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Hoover at the 70th percentile, close to its 67th-percentile risk score.
Hoover's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 40.5% of Hoover's 29,503 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 38.4% Direct and 21.1% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 29,503 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Hoover compares
Hoover ranks lower within Alabama (40th percentile statewide) than its 67th national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hoover ranks 10,387 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 394 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 357 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Hoover and the insurance market
Hoover's 67th-percentile, 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
Because 40.5% of Hoover's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 29,503 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Hoover. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Hoover, see the exposure-zones guide.