Brownsville, TX
How exposed is Brownsville to wildfire?
USFS scores Brownsville at the 91st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 56,043 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Brownsville's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 89th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 68.2% of Brownsville's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 7.9% Direct and 23.9% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 56,043 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Brownsville against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Brownsville's 91st national percentile and its 85th percentile inside Texas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Brownsville ranks 2,968 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 150 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 266 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Brownsville
Brownsville's 91st-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 68.2% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Brownsville gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 56,043 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Brownsville. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Brownsville, see the exposure-zones guide.