Waimanalo, HI
How exposed is Waimanalo to wildfire?
Waimanalo's 2,217 buildings earn a 96th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band 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 Waimanalo at the 95th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
Where Waimanalo's buildings actually sit
79.4% of Waimanalo's 2,217 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 20.6% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone.
Where Waimanalo ranks
There's little gap between Waimanalo's 96th national percentile and its 88th percentile inside Hawaii, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Waimanalo ranks 1,164 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,888 by building count (1 is largest). Within Hawaii alone, it ranks 21 of 163 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Hawaii on its state page.
Waimanalo and the insurance market
Waimanalo's 96th-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
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Waimanalo (79.4% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Waimanalo's 1,164-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Waimanalo, see the exposure-zones guide.