Crystal, NM
How exposed is Crystal to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Crystal at the 84th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 200 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Crystal at the 78th national percentile — 6 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Crystal's building exposure, zone by zone
Of Crystal's 200 counted buildings, 100% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Crystal against the rest of the country
Crystal's 84th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 61st ranking inside New Mexico does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 24 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Crystal ranks 4,953 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,848 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 196 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Crystal's 84th-percentile, very 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 Crystal
Because Direct exposure dominates in Crystal (100%), 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Crystal's 4,953-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Crystal, see the exposure-zones guide.