Waipahu, HI
Waipahu, HI's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Waipahu at the 88th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 5,975 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Waipahu at the 83rd national percentile — 5 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
5,975 buildings are counted in Waipahu, and 77.9% of them are Indirect exposure — ember-driven risk rather than the 2.2% in Direct exposure or the 19.9% rated Minimal. At 5,975 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Waipahu ranks
Inside Hawaii, Waipahu sits at just the 36th percentile even though it scores 88th 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, Waipahu ranks 3,749 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,884 by building count (1 is largest). Within Hawaii alone, it ranks 104 of 163 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Hawaii on its state page.
Waipahu and the insurance market
Waipahu's 88th-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
Because 77.9% of Waipahu's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
Where Waipahu's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,975 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Waipahu. The exposure-zones guide covers what Waipahu's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.