Chesapeake, VA
Chesapeake, VA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Chesapeake sits at the 70th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 92,330 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Chesapeake at the 64th national percentile — 6 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Chesapeake's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 45.7% of Chesapeake's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 34.8% Direct and 19.5% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 92,330 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Chesapeake ranks
There's little gap between Chesapeake's 70th national percentile and its 83rd percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Chesapeake ranks 9,436 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 74 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 117 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
Chesapeake's 70th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 45.7% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Chesapeake gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Chesapeake's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Chesapeake's 9,436-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Chesapeake's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.