Vestavia Hills, AL
How exposed is Vestavia Hills to wildfire?
USFS scores Vestavia Hills at the 67th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 12,894 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 Vestavia Hills at the 70th percentile, close to its 67th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Vestavia Hills's 12,894 counted buildings, 46.3% carry Direct exposure and only 36.2% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first. At 12,894 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Vestavia Hills compares
Inside Alabama, Vestavia Hills sits at just the 39th percentile even though it scores 67th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Vestavia Hills ranks 10,420 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,180 by building count (1 is largest). Within Alabama alone, it ranks 360 of 592 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Alabama on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Vestavia Hills's high rating (67th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because Direct exposure dominates in Vestavia Hills (46.3%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,894 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Vestavia Hills. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Vestavia Hills, see the exposure-zones guide.