Medicine Lake, MN
How exposed is Medicine Lake to wildfire?
Medicine Lake's 198 buildings earn a 33rd-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Medicine Lake at the 33rd national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Medicine Lake's buildings actually sit
Only 26.8% of Medicine Lake's 198 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 73.2% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Medicine Lake compares
There's little gap between Medicine Lake's 33rd national percentile and its 41st percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Medicine Lake ranks 20,989 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,924 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 536 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Medicine Lake
Medicine Lake's moderate wildfire rating (33rd 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
Medicine Lake's 73.2% 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
Medicine Lake's 33rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Medicine Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.