Baytown, TX
How exposed is Baytown to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Baytown lands at the 77th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 29,956 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Baytown at the 80th national percentile — 3 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
USFS classifies 91% of Baytown's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 8.6% Direct and 0.4% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 29,956 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Baytown against the rest of the country
Baytown's 77th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 53rd ranking inside Texas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 24 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Baytown ranks 7,225 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 385 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 845 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Baytown and the insurance market
Baytown'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
Baytown's 91% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where Baytown's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 29,956 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Baytown. The exposure-zones guide covers what Baytown's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.