Palmdale, PA
How exposed is Palmdale to wildfire?
Palmdale sits at the 19th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 806 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Palmdale's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 20th percentile nationally.
Palmdale's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 11% of Palmdale's 806 buildings carry Direct exposure and 21.1% carry Indirect; the remaining 67.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Palmdale compares
There's little gap between Palmdale's 19th national percentile and its 20th percentile inside Pennsylvania, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palmdale ranks 25,667 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,586 by building count (1 is largest). Within Pennsylvania alone, it ranks 1,597 of 1,991 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Pennsylvania on its state page.
Palmdale and the insurance market
Palmdale's low rating (19th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Palmdale
With 67.9% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Palmdale 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palmdale's 25,667-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palmdale, see the exposure-zones guide.