Edisto, SC
Edisto wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Edisto at the 66th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 1,462 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 Edisto at the 66th percentile, close to its 66th-percentile risk score.
Where Edisto's buildings actually sit
Most of Edisto's buildings (50.1%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Edisto compares
Inside South Carolina, Edisto sits at just the 41st percentile even though it scores 66th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Edisto ranks 10,660 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 9,343 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 281 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Edisto's 66th-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 Edisto
Because 50.1% of Edisto's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Edisto's 10,660-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Edisto, see the exposure-zones guide.