Duck, NC
Duck wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Duck at the 79th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 2,520 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Duck's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 68th percentile nationally.
Where Duck's buildings actually sit
Only 9.6% of Duck's 2,520 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 90.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Duck against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Duck's 79th national percentile and its 82nd percentile inside North Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Duck ranks 6,749 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,265 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Carolina alone, it ranks 140 of 772 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Duck
Duck's 79th-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 Duck
Duck's 90.4% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where Duck's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 2,520 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Duck. The exposure-zones guide covers what Duck's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.