Bay Pines, FL
Bay Pines wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Bay Pines lands at the 60th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 1,655 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 Bay Pines at the 61st percentile, close to its 60th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
89.8% of Bay Pines's 1,655 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 10.2% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
How Bay Pines compares
Bay Pines's 60th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 14th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 46 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bay Pines ranks 12,570 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,573 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 817 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Bay Pines and the insurance market
Bay Pines's 60th-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 89.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Bay Pines gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Bay Pines's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,655 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Bay Pines. The exposure-zones guide covers what Bay Pines's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.