Mountain Home, ID
Mountain Home, ID's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Mountain Home lands at the 99th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 6,205 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Mountain Home's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 99th percentile nationally.
Mountain Home's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Mountain Home's buildings (87.2%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 6,205 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Mountain Home against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Mountain Home's 99th national percentile and its 96th percentile inside Idaho, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mountain Home ranks 417 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,797 by building count (1 is largest). Within Idaho alone, it ranks 11 of 232 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Idaho on its state page.
Mountain Home and the insurance market
Mountain Home's 99th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Mountain Home (87.2% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Mountain Home's 99th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Mountain Home, see the exposure-zones guide.