Georgetown, SC
Georgetown wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Georgetown at the 90th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 4,426 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Georgetown at the 88th percentile, close to its 90th-percentile risk score.
Georgetown's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Georgetown's buildings (64.8%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Georgetown compares
Georgetown's risk sits at a similar level relative to South Carolina (97th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (90th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Georgetown ranks 3,193 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,856 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 15 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Georgetown
Georgetown's 90th-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
Because 64.8% of Georgetown's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Georgetown's 3,193-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Georgetown, see the exposure-zones guide.