Blue Ridge, VA
Blue Ridge, VA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Blue Ridge's 1,609 buildings earn a 75th-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.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Blue Ridge at the 73rd national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Blue Ridge's buildings actually sit
1,609 buildings are counted in Blue Ridge, and 84.8% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Blue Ridge compares
There's little gap between Blue Ridge's 75th national percentile and its 89th percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Blue Ridge ranks 7,865 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,735 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 75 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Blue Ridge's 75th-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
Blue Ridge's 84.8% 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 Blue Ridge's 7,865-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Blue Ridge, see the exposure-zones guide.