Port Angeles, WA
Port Angeles, WA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Port Angeles sits at the 36th 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 10,650 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Port Angeles's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 35th percentile nationally.
Port Angeles's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Port Angeles's buildings (81.7%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 10,650 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Port Angeles compares
Compare Port Angeles's two percentiles: 55th within Washington, only 36th nationally — a gap of 18 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Port Angeles ranks 20,093 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,497 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 285 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Port Angeles and the insurance market
Port Angeles's moderate rating (36th 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
Because 81.7% of Port Angeles's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Port Angeles's 36th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Port Angeles, see the exposure-zones guide.