Bethlehem, MS
Bethlehem wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Bethlehem at the 81st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 184 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Bethlehem's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 85th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Bethlehem's 184 counted buildings, 98.9% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where Bethlehem ranks
There's little gap between Bethlehem's 81st national percentile and its 83rd percentile inside Mississippi, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bethlehem ranks 5,865 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,466 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 72 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Bethlehem and the insurance market
Bethlehem's 81st-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
Bethlehem's 98.9% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bethlehem's 5,865-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Bethlehem, see the exposure-zones guide.