Kennewick, WA
How exposed is Kennewick to wildfire?
USFS scores Kennewick at the 94th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 29,190 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Kennewick at the 95th percentile, close to its 94th-percentile risk score.
Kennewick's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Kennewick's buildings (60.8% of 29,190) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 29,190 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Kennewick compares
Kennewick scores 94th nationally and 86th within Washington — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Kennewick ranks 1,779 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 401 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 90 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Kennewick and the insurance market
Kennewick'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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 60.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Kennewick gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Kennewick's 1,779-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Kennewick, see the exposure-zones guide.