Orleans, MA
How exposed is Orleans to wildfire?
Orleans's 1,238 buildings earn a 24th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Orleans at the 18th percentile, close to its 24th-percentile risk score.
Where Orleans's buildings actually sit
Only 22.6% of Orleans's 1,238 buildings carry Direct exposure and 22.3% carry Indirect; the remaining 55.1% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Orleans against the rest of the country
Compare Orleans's two percentiles: 40th 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, Orleans ranks 23,831 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,421 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 147 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Orleans
Orleans'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.
Hardening a home in Orleans
With 55.1% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Orleans gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,238 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Orleans. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Orleans, see the exposure-zones guide.