Friendswood, TX
Friendswood wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Friendswood at the 71st national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 16,417 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 Friendswood at the 75th percentile, close to its 71st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Friendswood rates 59.6% Minimal exposure against just 13.1% Direct and 27.4% Indirect — of 16,417 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 16,417 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Friendswood compares
Friendswood ranks lower within Texas (34th percentile statewide) than its 71st national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Friendswood ranks 9,090 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 884 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 1,181 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Friendswood
Friendswood's 71st-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
Even with 59.6% of Friendswood outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
Where Friendswood's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Friendswood's 9,090-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Friendswood's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.