Harrisonburg, VA
Harrisonburg wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Harrisonburg at the 52nd national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 11,551 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Harrisonburg's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 54th percentile nationally.
Harrisonburg's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 12.3% of Harrisonburg's 11,551 buildings carry Direct exposure and 28.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 59.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 11,551 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Harrisonburg against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Harrisonburg's 52nd national percentile and its 56th percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Harrisonburg ranks 15,143 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,360 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 296 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Harrisonburg
Harrisonburg's elevated wildfire rating (52nd percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 59.4% of Harrisonburg 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Harrisonburg's 15,143-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Harrisonburg, see the exposure-zones guide.