Chestertown, MD
Chestertown wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Chestertown at the 25th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 1,823 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 Chestertown at the 23rd percentile, close to its 25th-percentile risk score.
Chestertown's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 60.6% of Chestertown's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 34.1% Direct and 5.3% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Chestertown against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Chestertown's 25th national percentile and its 35th percentile inside Maryland, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Chestertown ranks 23,696 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,996 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 344 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Chestertown and the insurance market
Chestertown's moderate wildfire rating (25th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 60.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Chestertown 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
Chestertown's 25th-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 Chestertown, see the exposure-zones guide.