Folly Beach, SC
How exposed is Folly Beach to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Folly Beach at the 92nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 1,788 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 Folly Beach at the 86th percentile, close to its 92nd-percentile risk score.
Folly Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 53.4% of Folly Beach's 1,788 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 16.8% Direct and 29.8% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Folly Beach against the rest of the country
Folly Beach's risk sits at a similar level relative to South Carolina (99th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (92nd) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Folly Beach ranks 2,532 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,104 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 7 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Folly Beach
Folly Beach's 92nd-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
Folly Beach's 53.4% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Folly Beach's figures come from
Folly Beach's 92nd-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 Folly Beach's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.