Dargan, MD
Dargan wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Dargan at the 62nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 127 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Dargan at the 61st national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Dargan's building exposure, zone by zone
Of Dargan's 127 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.
Dargan against the rest of the country
Within Maryland, Dargan ranks higher (88th percentile) than it does nationally (62nd) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Dargan ranks 11,914 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,853 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 63 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Dargan and the insurance market
Dargan's 62nd-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Dargan's 100% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Dargan's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Dargan's 11,914-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Dargan's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.