Rainsville, AL
How exposed is Rainsville to wildfire?
Rainsville's 4,015 buildings earn a 80th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Rainsville at the 85th percentile, close to its 80th-percentile risk score.
Where Rainsville's buildings actually sit
4,015 buildings are counted in Rainsville, and 76.3% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 6.5% rated Minimal.
How Rainsville compares
There's little gap between Rainsville's 80th national percentile and its 76th percentile inside Alabama, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rainsville ranks 6,227 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,235 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 143 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Rainsville and the insurance market
Rainsville's 80th-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
Because Direct exposure dominates in Rainsville (76.3%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Rainsville's 80th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Rainsville, see the exposure-zones guide.