Westcliffe, CO
Westcliffe wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Westcliffe at the 70th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 561 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Westcliffe at the 72nd national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Westcliffe's building exposure, zone by zone
57.4% of Westcliffe's 561 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 42.6% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone.
How Westcliffe compares
Inside Colorado, Westcliffe sits at just the 37th percentile even though it scores 70th 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, Westcliffe ranks 9,573 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,386 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 301 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Westcliffe's 70th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Westcliffe (57.4% 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 Westcliffe's 9,573-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Westcliffe, see the exposure-zones guide.