Portage, IN
How exposed is Portage to wildfire?
USFS scores Portage at the 52nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 15,708 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Portage at the 55th percentile, close to its 52nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Portage rates 92.4% Minimal exposure against just 7.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 15,708 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 15,708 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Portage ranks
Portage's 98th-percentile standing inside Indiana outpaces its 52nd national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Portage ranks 15,121 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 934 by building count (1 is largest). Within Indiana alone, it ranks 24 of 967 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Indiana on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Portage
Portage's elevated wildfire rating (52nd percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Hardening a home in Portage
Portage's 92.4% 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.
Where Portage's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 15,708 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Portage. The exposure-zones guide covers what Portage's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.