Lake of the Woods, AZ
How exposed is Lake of the Woods to wildfire?
USFS scores Lake of the Woods at the 98th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 2,829 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 Lake of the Woods at the 97th percentile, close to its 98th-percentile risk score.
Where Lake of the Woods's buildings actually sit
2,829 buildings are counted in Lake of the Woods, and 66.7% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0.3% rated Minimal.
Where Lake of the Woods ranks
There's little gap between Lake of the Woods's 98th national percentile and its 88th percentile inside Arizona, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lake of the Woods ranks 649 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,700 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 54 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Lake of the Woods and the insurance market
Lake of the Woods's 98th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because Direct exposure dominates in Lake of the Woods (66.7%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Lake of the Woods's 649-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Lake of the Woods, see the exposure-zones guide.