Cheswold, DE
Cheswold wildfire risk explained
Cheswold sits at the 39th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 881 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Cheswold at the 40th percentile, close to its 39th-percentile risk score.
Where Cheswold's buildings actually sit
Only 34.6% of Cheswold's 881 buildings carry Direct exposure and 7.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 57.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Where Cheswold ranks
There's little gap between Cheswold's 39th national percentile and its 41st percentile inside Delaware, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cheswold ranks 19,183 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,895 by building count (1 is largest). Within Delaware alone, it ranks 47 of 79 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Delaware on its state page.
Cheswold and the insurance market
Cheswold's moderate wildfire rating (39th 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
Even with 57.9% of Cheswold outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Cheswold's 19,183-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Cheswold, see the exposure-zones guide.