Cottonwood Shores, TX
Cottonwood Shores, TX's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Cottonwood Shores's 675 buildings earn a 78th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Cottonwood Shores at the 77th percentile, close to its 78th-percentile risk score.
Cottonwood Shores's building exposure, zone by zone
Of Cottonwood Shores's 675 counted buildings, 63.1% carry Direct exposure and only 0.3% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Cottonwood Shores compares
Cottonwood Shores's 78th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 55th ranking inside Texas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 23 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cottonwood Shores ranks 7,008 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,931 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 802 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Cottonwood Shores
Cottonwood Shores's 78th-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.
Hardening a home in Cottonwood Shores
Because Direct exposure dominates in Cottonwood Shores (63.1%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Cottonwood Shores's 78th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Cottonwood Shores, see the exposure-zones guide.