Tuscaloosa, AL
Tuscaloosa, AL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Tuscaloosa at the 63rd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 30,908 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Tuscaloosa at the 66th percentile, close to its 63rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Tuscaloosa rates 44.8% Minimal exposure against just 33.8% Direct and 21.4% Indirect — of 30,908 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 30,908 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Tuscaloosa compares
Tuscaloosa's 63rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 32nd ranking inside Alabama does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 31 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tuscaloosa ranks 11,682 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 366 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 405 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
Tuscaloosa and the insurance market
At the 63rd percentile nationally, Tuscaloosa carries the high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
With 44.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Tuscaloosa gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 30,908 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Tuscaloosa. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Tuscaloosa, see the exposure-zones guide.