Portland, CO
Portland wildfire risk explained
Portland sits at the 84th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 132 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Portland at the 79th percentile, close to its 84th-percentile risk score.
Portland's building exposure, zone by zone
100% of Portland's 132 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 132 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 0% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 0% are Minimal.
How Portland compares
Portland's 84th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 65th ranking inside Colorado does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 20 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Portland ranks 4,913 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,612 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 169 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Portland and the insurance market
Portland's 84th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 100% of Portland in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Portland's 4,913-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Portland, see the exposure-zones guide.