Middletown, NY
Middletown wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Middletown at the 44th national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 8,428 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Middletown at the 45th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Middletown's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 14.5% of Middletown's 8,428 buildings carry Direct exposure and 34.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 51% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 8,428 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Middletown ranks
Compare Middletown's two percentiles: 89th within New York, only 44th nationally — a gap of 45 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Middletown ranks 17,527 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,975 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 139 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Middletown
Middletown's elevated wildfire rating (44th 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
Even with 51% of Middletown outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Middletown's 17,527-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Middletown, see the exposure-zones guide.