Berea, KY
How exposed is Berea to wildfire?
USFS scores Berea at the 60th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 6,534 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 Berea at the 63rd percentile, close to its 60th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Berea's buildings (67%) 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. At 6,534 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Berea ranks
Compare Berea's two percentiles: 82nd within Kentucky, only 60th nationally — a gap of 22 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Berea ranks 12,541 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,656 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kentucky alone, it ranks 101 of 552 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kentucky on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Berea'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 ember exposure the dominant pattern in Berea (67% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 6,534 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Berea. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Berea, see the exposure-zones guide.