Paradise, PA
Paradise, PA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Paradise at the 3rd national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 629 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Paradise at the 4th percentile, close to its 3rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 39.6% of Paradise's 629 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 60.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Paradise compares
There's little gap between Paradise's 3rd national percentile and its 1st percentile inside Pennsylvania, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Paradise ranks 30,496 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,460 by building count (1 is largest). Within Pennsylvania alone, it ranks 1,974 of 1,991 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Pennsylvania on its state page.
Paradise and the insurance market
Paradise's low rating (3rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 60.4% of Paradise outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 629 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Paradise. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Paradise, see the exposure-zones guide.