Beaufort, SC
Beaufort wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Beaufort at the 82nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 5,133 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Beaufort at the 76th national percentile — 6 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Beaufort's 5,133 counted buildings, 61% carry Direct exposure and only 26.1% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first. At 5,133 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Beaufort against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Beaufort's 82nd national percentile and its 88th percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Beaufort ranks 5,808 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,362 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 58 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Beaufort
Beaufort's very high rating (82nd percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Beaufort's 61% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,133 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Beaufort. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Beaufort, see the exposure-zones guide.