Belhaven, NC
Belhaven wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Belhaven at the 80th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 1,063 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Belhaven at the 69th percentile, lower than its 80th-percentile risk score, because so much is actually built here.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Belhaven's buildings (74.7%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Belhaven compares
There's little gap between Belhaven's 80th national percentile and its 84th percentile inside North Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Belhaven ranks 6,434 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,504 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Carolina alone, it ranks 119 of 772 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Carolina on its state page.
Belhaven and the insurance market
Belhaven's high rating (80th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 74.7% of Belhaven's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Belhaven's 6,434-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Belhaven, see the exposure-zones guide.