Red Lake Falls, MN
How exposed is Red Lake Falls to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Red Lake Falls at the 62nd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 971 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Red Lake Falls at the 61st national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Red Lake Falls's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Red Lake Falls's buildings (68%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Red Lake Falls compares
Red Lake Falls's 88th-percentile standing inside Minnesota outpaces its 62nd 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, Red Lake Falls ranks 11,873 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,141 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 115 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Red Lake Falls and the insurance market
Red Lake Falls's 62nd-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Red Lake Falls's 68% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Red Lake Falls's 11,873-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Red Lake Falls, see the exposure-zones guide.