Walsenburg, CO
Walsenburg wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Walsenburg lands at the 77th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 2,307 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Walsenburg at the 72nd percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
Where Walsenburg's buildings actually sit
Most of Walsenburg's buildings (86.2%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
Where Walsenburg ranks
Inside Colorado, Walsenburg sits at just the 48th percentile even though it scores 77th 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, Walsenburg ranks 7,309 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,681 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 247 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Walsenburg and the insurance market
Walsenburg's 77th-percentile, 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.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Walsenburg (86.2% 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 Walsenburg's 7,309-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Walsenburg, see the exposure-zones guide.