Amherstdale, WV
Amherstdale wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Amherstdale at the 97th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 215 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Amherstdale at the 98th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Amherstdale's 215 counted buildings, 65.1% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Amherstdale compares
There's little gap between Amherstdale's 97th national percentile and its 100th percentile inside West Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Amherstdale ranks 1,056 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,322 by building count (1 is largest). Within West Virginia alone, it ranks 1 of 429 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for West Virginia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Amherstdale
Amherstdale's 97th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Amherstdale's 65.1% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Amherstdale's 1,056-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Amherstdale, see the exposure-zones guide.