Kalaheo, HI
Kalaheo wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Kalaheo at the 94th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 1,971 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Kalaheo at the 92nd percentile, close to its 94th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Kalaheo's buildings (52.4%) 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.
Where Kalaheo ranks
Kalaheo's 94th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 68th ranking inside Hawaii does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 26 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Kalaheo ranks 1,857 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,558 by building count (1 is largest). Within Hawaii alone, it ranks 53 of 163 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Hawaii on its state page.
Kalaheo and the insurance market
Kalaheo's 94th-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.
Hardening a home in Kalaheo
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Kalaheo (52.4% 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 Kalaheo's 1,857-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Kalaheo, see the exposure-zones guide.