Sandy, UT
How exposed is Sandy to wildfire?
Sandy sits at the 97th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 31,717 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (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 at the 94th percentile, close to its 97th-percentile risk score.
Where Sandy's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 86.6% of Sandy's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3.8% Direct and 9.6% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 31,717 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 compares
There's little gap between Sandy's 97th national percentile and its 91st percentile inside Utah, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sandy ranks 864 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 350 by building count (1 is largest). Within Utah alone, it ranks 30 of 326 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Utah on its state page.
Sandy and the insurance market
Sandy's very high rating (97th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 86.6% of Sandy outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Sandy's 97th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sandy, see the exposure-zones guide.