Kurtistown, HI
Kurtistown wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Kurtistown at the 87th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 1,654 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 Kurtistown at the 85th percentile, close to its 87th-percentile risk score.
Where Kurtistown's buildings actually sit
Of Kurtistown's 1,654 counted buildings, 88.6% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where Kurtistown ranks
Kurtistown's 87th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 31st ranking inside Hawaii does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 56 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Kurtistown ranks 4,000 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,578 by building count (1 is largest). Within Hawaii alone, it ranks 113 of 163 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Hawaii on its state page.
Kurtistown and the insurance market
Kurtistown's very high rating (87th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 88.6% of Kurtistown in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Kurtistown's 4,000-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Kurtistown, see the exposure-zones guide.