Sumas, WA
How exposed is Sumas to wildfire?
Sumas's 721 buildings earn a 10th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Sumas at the 13th percentile, close to its 10th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Sumas rates 56.6% Minimal exposure against just 23.3% Direct and 20.1% Indirect — of 721 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Where Sumas ranks
There's little gap between Sumas's 10th national percentile and its 11th percentile inside Washington, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sumas ranks 28,320 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,446 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 561 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Sumas
Sumas's low wildfire rating (10th 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
Sumas's 56.6% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sumas's 28,320-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sumas, see the exposure-zones guide.