Safford, AZ
How exposed is Safford to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Safford at the 82nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 4,754 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 Safford at the 81st percentile, close to its 82nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 65.4% of Safford's 4,754 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 11.1% Direct and 23.5% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Safford against the rest of the country
Inside Arizona, Safford sits at just the 49th percentile even though it scores 82nd nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Safford ranks 5,535 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,590 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 227 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Safford's 82nd-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 65.4% of Safford's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Safford's 82nd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Safford, see the exposure-zones guide.