Garden City, SC
Garden City wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Garden City at the 61st national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 6,690 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Garden City at the 59th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Garden City's buildings (83.7% of 6,690) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 6,690 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Garden City compares
Inside South Carolina, Garden City sits at just the 23rd percentile even though it scores 61st 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, Garden City ranks 12,178 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,590 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 365 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Garden City's 61st-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 83.7% of Garden City 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 Garden City's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 6,690 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Garden City. The exposure-zones guide covers what Garden City's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.