Sierra Vista, AZ
Sierra Vista, AZ's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Sierra Vista at the 98th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 18,448 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Sierra Vista at the 99th percentile, close to its 98th-percentile risk score.
Sierra Vista's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 76% of Sierra Vista's 18,448 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 14.8% Direct and 9.2% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 18,448 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sierra Vista compares
Sierra Vista's risk sits at a similar level relative to Arizona (88th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (98th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sierra Vista ranks 588 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 775 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 52 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Sierra Vista
Sierra Vista's 98th-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
Sierra Vista's 76% 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 Sierra Vista's 588-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Sierra Vista, see the exposure-zones guide.