Mercer Island, WA
How exposed is Mercer Island to wildfire?
Mercer Island's 8,290 buildings earn a 6th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Mercer Island at the 6th percentile, close to its 6th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
88.8% of Mercer Island's 8,290 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 11.2% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 8,290 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Mercer Island against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Mercer Island's 6th national percentile and its 4th percentile inside Washington, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mercer Island ranks 29,581 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,012 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 602 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Mercer Island
Mercer Island's low wildfire rating (6th 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
With 88.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Mercer Island gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Mercer Island's 29,581-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Mercer Island, see the exposure-zones guide.