Glen Dale, WV
Glen Dale wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Glen Dale at the 35th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 962 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 Glen Dale at the 35th percentile, close to its 35th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Glen Dale's buildings (90.4%) 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 Glen Dale compares
Inside West Virginia, Glen Dale sits at just the 5th percentile even though it scores 35th 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, Glen Dale ranks 20,403 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,215 by building count (1 is largest). Within West Virginia alone, it ranks 407 of 429 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for West Virginia on its state page.
Glen Dale and the insurance market
Glen Dale's moderate rating (35th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Glen Dale's 90.4% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Glen Dale's 20,403-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Glen Dale, see the exposure-zones guide.