Mizpah, NJ
Mizpah wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Mizpah at the 86th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 262 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Mizpah at the 85th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Mizpah's 262 counted buildings, 98.5% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Mizpah against the rest of the country
Mizpah scores 86th nationally and 91st within New Jersey — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mizpah ranks 4,477 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,774 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Jersey alone, it ranks 63 of 700 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Jersey on its state page.
Mizpah and the insurance market
Mizpah's 86th-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
With 98.5% of Mizpah in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Mizpah's 4,477-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Mizpah, see the exposure-zones guide.