Sandy Hook, CT
How exposed is Sandy Hook to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Sandy Hook at the 41st national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 8,053 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 Sandy Hook at the 40th percentile, close to its 41st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Direct exposure dominates in Sandy Hook: 89% of its 8,053 buildings, versus 10.3% Indirect and 0.7% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap. At 8,053 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sandy Hook compares
Within Connecticut, Sandy Hook ranks higher (85th percentile) than it does nationally (41st) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sandy Hook ranks 18,458 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,091 by building count (1 is largest). Within Connecticut alone, it ranks 33 of 214 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Connecticut on its state page.
Sandy Hook and the insurance market
Sandy Hook's elevated wildfire rating (41st 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Sandy Hook's 89% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sandy Hook's 18,458-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Sandy Hook, see the exposure-zones guide.