El Morro Valley, NM
El Morro Valley, NM's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores El Morro Valley at the 69th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 74 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 El Morro Valley at the 67th percentile, close to its 69th-percentile risk score.
Where El Morro Valley's buildings actually sit
Of El Morro Valley's 74 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.
Where El Morro Valley ranks
Inside New Mexico, El Morro Valley sits at just the 40th percentile even though it scores 69th 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, El Morro Valley ranks 9,806 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 30,142 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 297 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
El Morro Valley and the insurance market
El Morro Valley's 69th-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
El Morro Valley'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 El Morro Valley's figures come from
El Morro Valley's 69th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what El Morro Valley's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.