Elgin, TN
How exposed is Elgin to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Elgin at the 86th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 192 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Elgin at the 89th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
192 buildings are counted in Elgin, and 82.8% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
Elgin against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Elgin's 86th national percentile and its 97th percentile inside Tennessee, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Elgin ranks 4,330 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,176 by building count (1 is largest). Within Tennessee alone, it ranks 14 of 502 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Tennessee on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Elgin
Elgin's 86th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Elgin's 82.8% 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.
More on how this number was built
Elgin's 86th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Elgin, see the exposure-zones guide.