Sweetwater, ID
Sweetwater wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Sweetwater at the 87th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 128 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 Sweetwater at the 90th percentile, close to its 87th-percentile risk score.
Sweetwater's building exposure, zone by zone
128 buildings are counted in Sweetwater, and 96.9% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Sweetwater compares
Sweetwater's 87th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 62nd ranking inside Idaho does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 26 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sweetwater ranks 4,034 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,788 by building count (1 is largest). Within Idaho alone, it ranks 90 of 232 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Idaho on its state page.
Sweetwater and the insurance market
Sweetwater's 87th-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
Sweetwater's 96.9% 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
Sweetwater's 87th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Sweetwater, see the exposure-zones guide.