Ellicott City, MD
Ellicott City, MD's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Ellicott City at the 17th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 21,484 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Ellicott City at the 16th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Ellicott City's buildings actually sit
Of Ellicott City's 21,484 counted buildings, 67.6% carry Direct exposure and only 18.3% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first. At 21,484 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Ellicott City compares
There's little gap between Ellicott City's 17th national percentile and its 19th percentile inside Maryland, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ellicott City ranks 26,127 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 645 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 427 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Ellicott City
At the 17th national percentile, Ellicott City rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Ellicott City's 67.6% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 21,484 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Ellicott City. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Ellicott City, see the exposure-zones guide.