Burke, VA
Burke wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Burke at the 18th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 9,822 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Burke at the 19th percentile, close to its 18th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 36.1% of Burke's 9,822 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 63.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 9,822 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Burke ranks
There's little gap between Burke's 18th national percentile and its 9th percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Burke ranks 25,795 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,654 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 619 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Burke and the insurance market
Burke's low wildfire rating (18th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Burke's 63.9% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Burke's 18th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Burke, see the exposure-zones guide.