Blacksburg, VA
Blacksburg wildfire risk explained
Blacksburg's 8,387 buildings earn a 66th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Blacksburg's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 66th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
8,387 buildings are counted in Blacksburg, and 78.2% of them are Indirect exposure — ember-driven risk rather than the 21.7% in Direct exposure or the 0.1% rated Minimal. At 8,387 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Blacksburg ranks
Blacksburg scores 66th nationally and 77th within Virginia — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Blacksburg ranks 10,857 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,985 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 157 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Blacksburg and the insurance market
Blacksburg's 66th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 78.2% of Blacksburg'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
Blacksburg's 66th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Blacksburg, see the exposure-zones guide.