Sterrett, AL
How exposed is Sterrett to wildfire?
USFS scores Sterrett at the 81st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 597 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 Sterrett at the 84th percentile, close to its 81st-percentile risk score.
Where Sterrett's buildings actually sit
Of Sterrett's 597 counted buildings, 97.8% carry Direct exposure and only 0.2% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Sterrett compares
There's little gap between Sterrett's 81st national percentile and its 78th percentile inside Alabama, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sterrett ranks 5,976 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,876 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 129 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Sterrett and the insurance market
Sterrett's 81st-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.
Hardening a home in Sterrett
Because Direct exposure dominates in Sterrett (97.8%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sterrett's 5,976-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Sterrett, see the exposure-zones guide.