Sylvan Lake, MI
Sylvan Lake wildfire risk explained
Sylvan Lake's 992 buildings earn a 7th-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 Sylvan Lake at the 8th percentile, close to its 7th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Sylvan Lake rates 88.3% Minimal exposure against just 11.7% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 992 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Where Sylvan Lake ranks
There's little gap between Sylvan Lake's 7th national percentile and its 19th percentile inside Michigan, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sylvan Lake ranks 29,384 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,993 by building count (1 is largest). Within Michigan alone, it ranks 605 of 745 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Michigan on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Sylvan Lake's low rating (7th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Sylvan Lake's 88.3% 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 Sylvan Lake's 29,384-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sylvan Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.