Crab Orchard, WV
How exposed is Crab Orchard to wildfire?
USFS scores Crab Orchard at the 67th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 1,575 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Crab Orchard at the 70th percentile, close to its 67th-percentile risk score.
Crab Orchard's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 63.5% of Crab Orchard's 1,575 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 36.5% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Where Crab Orchard ranks
Crab Orchard scores 67th nationally and 61st within West Virginia — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Crab Orchard ranks 10,291 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,863 by building count (1 is largest). Within West Virginia alone, it ranks 170 of 429 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for West Virginia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Crab Orchard
Crab Orchard's 67th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Crab Orchard's 63.5% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Crab Orchard's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,575 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Crab Orchard. The exposure-zones guide covers what Crab Orchard's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.