Gifford, SC
Gifford wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Gifford at the 74th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 188 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Gifford at the 74th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Gifford's buildings actually sit
188 buildings are counted in Gifford, and 71.3% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Gifford compares
There's little gap between Gifford's 74th national percentile and its 72nd percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gifford ranks 8,135 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,332 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 134 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Gifford and the insurance market
Gifford's 74th-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
Gifford's 71.3% 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.
Where Gifford's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gifford's 8,135-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Gifford's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.