Norwood, MA
Norwood wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Norwood lands at the 24th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 9,015 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Norwood at the 21st percentile, close to its 24th-percentile risk score.
Where Norwood's buildings actually sit
Norwood rates 94.8% Minimal exposure against just 2.4% Direct and 2.8% Indirect — of 9,015 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 9,015 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Norwood against the rest of the country
Compare Norwood's two percentiles: 41st within Massachusetts, only 24th nationally — a gap of 16 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Norwood ranks 23,830 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,840 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 146 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Norwood and the insurance market
Norwood's moderate wildfire rating (24th 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 94.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Norwood gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Norwood's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 9,015 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Norwood. The exposure-zones guide covers what Norwood's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.