Moses Lake, WA
Moses Lake wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Moses Lake at the 78th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 9,862 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Moses Lake's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 78th percentile nationally.
Moses Lake's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Moses Lake's buildings (88.4% of 9,862) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 9,862 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Moses Lake against the rest of the country
Moses Lake scores 78th nationally and 74th within Washington — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Moses Lake ranks 6,825 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,643 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 164 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Moses Lake and the insurance market
Moses Lake's 78th-percentile, 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
Moses Lake's 88.4% 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
Moses Lake's 78th-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 Moses Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.