Pasadena, MD
Pasadena, MD's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Pasadena sits at the 29th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 9,789 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Pasadena's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 29th percentile nationally.
Pasadena's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 25.3% of Pasadena's 9,789 buildings carry Direct exposure and 11.2% carry Indirect; the remaining 63.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 9,789 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Pasadena compares
Compare Pasadena's two percentiles: 44th within Maryland, only 29th nationally — a gap of 15 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pasadena ranks 22,376 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,665 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 294 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Pasadena and the insurance market
Pasadena's moderate rating (29th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Pasadena's 63.5% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pasadena's 22,376-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Pasadena, see the exposure-zones guide.