Salmon Creek, WA
How exposed is Salmon Creek to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Salmon Creek at the 18th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 7,667 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Salmon Creek at the 21st national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
95.2% of Salmon Creek's 7,667 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 3.4% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 7,667 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Salmon Creek compares
There's little gap between Salmon Creek's 18th national percentile and its 26th percentile inside Washington, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Salmon Creek ranks 25,798 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,227 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 465 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Salmon Creek
Salmon Creek's low wildfire rating (18th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Salmon Creek's 95.2% 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.
Where Salmon Creek's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,667 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Salmon Creek. The exposure-zones guide covers what Salmon Creek's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.