Pittsfield, MA
Pittsfield, MA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Pittsfield lands at the 18th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 19,125 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Pittsfield at the 18th percentile, close to its 18th-percentile risk score.
Pittsfield's building exposure, zone by zone
Indirect exposure is dominant in Pittsfield (46.5% of 19,125 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 27.3% sit in the Direct zone. At 19,125 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Pittsfield compares
There's little gap between Pittsfield's 18th national percentile and its 13th percentile inside Massachusetts, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pittsfield ranks 26,005 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 740 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 216 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 18th national percentile, Pittsfield rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Pittsfield's 46.5% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pittsfield's 26,005-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Pittsfield, see the exposure-zones guide.