Plattsburgh, NY
How exposed is Plattsburgh to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Plattsburgh at the 13th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 5,575 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 Plattsburgh at the 11th percentile, close to its 13th-percentile risk score.
Plattsburgh's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Plattsburgh's buildings (98.3% of 5,575) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 5,575 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Plattsburgh compares
Compare Plattsburgh's two percentiles: 31st within New York, only 13th nationally — a gap of 18 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Plattsburgh ranks 27,553 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,089 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 897 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Plattsburgh and the insurance market
Plattsburgh's low rating (13th 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
Plattsburgh's 98.3% 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 Plattsburgh's 27,553-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Plattsburgh, see the exposure-zones guide.