Pueblo, CO
How exposed is Pueblo to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Pueblo at the 76th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 49,899 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 Pueblo at the 76th percentile, close to its 76th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 1.7% of Pueblo's 49,899 buildings carry Direct exposure and 48.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 49.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 49,899 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Pueblo ranks
Pueblo's 76th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 47th ranking inside Colorado does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 30 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pueblo ranks 7,432 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 177 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 253 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Pueblo
Pueblo's 76th-percentile, 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.
Hardening a home in Pueblo
Pueblo's 49.9% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 49,899 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Pueblo. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Pueblo, see the exposure-zones guide.