Portage Lakes, OH
Portage Lakes wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Portage Lakes at the 28th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 3,922 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Portage Lakes at the 29th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Portage Lakes's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 76.6% of Portage Lakes's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 23% Direct and 0.4% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Portage Lakes against the rest of the country
Portage Lakes's 61st-percentile standing inside Ohio outpaces its 28th 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 Lakes ranks 22,863 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,313 by building count (1 is largest). Within Ohio alone, it ranks 497 of 1,264 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Ohio on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Portage Lakes
Portage Lakes's moderate rating (28th 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
Portage Lakes's 76.6% 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 Portage Lakes's 22,863-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Portage Lakes, see the exposure-zones guide.