Panama, NY
Panama wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Panama at the 39th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 284 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Panama at the 41st percentile, close to its 39th-percentile risk score.
Where Panama's buildings actually sit
Of Panama's 284 counted buildings, 96.8% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where Panama ranks
Panama's 84th-percentile standing inside New York outpaces its 39th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Panama ranks 19,136 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,068 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 215 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Panama and the insurance market
Panama's moderate wildfire rating (39th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Panama's 96.8% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Panama's 19,136-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Panama, see the exposure-zones guide.