Bay St. Louis, MS
Bay St. Louis, MS's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Bay St. Louis sits at the 96th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 6,768 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (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 St. Louis at the 96th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
71% of Bay St. Louis's 6,768 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 19.6% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 6,768 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Bay St. Louis ranks
There's little gap between Bay St. Louis's 96th national percentile and its 99th percentile inside Mississippi, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bay St. Louis ranks 1,292 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,554 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 4 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Bay St. Louis and the insurance market
Bay St. Louis's 96th-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
Even with 71% of Bay St. Louis outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bay St. Louis's 1,292-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bay St. Louis, see the exposure-zones guide.