Marblehead, MA
How exposed is Marblehead to wildfire?
Marblehead's 8,161 buildings earn a 19th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Marblehead at the 17th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Marblehead's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 1.9% of Marblehead's 8,161 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 98.1% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 8,161 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Marblehead against the rest of the country
Marblehead scores 19th nationally and 17th within Massachusetts — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Marblehead ranks 25,688 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,056 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 206 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Marblehead and the insurance market
Marblehead's low wildfire rating (19th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Marblehead's 98.1% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 8,161 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Marblehead. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Marblehead, see the exposure-zones guide.