Lake Charles, LA
How exposed is Lake Charles to wildfire?
Lake Charles sits at the 75th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 34,982 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Lake Charles at the 74th percentile, close to its 75th-percentile risk score.
Lake Charles's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Lake Charles's buildings (75.3% of 34,982) 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 34,982 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Lake Charles against the rest of the country
Lake Charles's risk sits at a similar level relative to Louisiana (88th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (75th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lake Charles ranks 8,003 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 309 by building count (1 is largest). Within Louisiana alone, it ranks 60 of 488 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Louisiana on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Lake Charles
Lake Charles's 75th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Lake Charles's 75.3% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Lake Charles's 8,003-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Lake Charles, see the exposure-zones guide.