Valley Falls, RI
How exposed is Valley Falls to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Valley Falls lands at the 14th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 4,508 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Valley Falls at the 13th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 88.8% of Valley Falls's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 7.5% Direct and 3.7% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Where Valley Falls ranks
Compare Valley Falls's two percentiles: 49th within Rhode Island, only 14th nationally — a gap of 34 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Valley Falls ranks 26,992 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,787 by building count (1 is largest). Within Rhode Island alone, it ranks 19 of 36 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Rhode Island on its state page.
Valley Falls and the insurance market
Valley Falls's low wildfire rating (14th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 88.8% of Valley Falls outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Valley Falls's 14th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Valley Falls, see the exposure-zones guide.