Hartley, TX
Hartley wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Hartley at the 87th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 374 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Hartley at the 86th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Hartley's buildings actually sit
Of Hartley's 374 counted buildings, 62.8% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Hartley compares
Hartley's risk sits at a similar level relative to Texas (79th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (87th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hartley ranks 4,051 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 19,791 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 386 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Hartley and the insurance market
Hartley's 87th-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
Hartley's 62.8% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Hartley's 4,051-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Hartley, see the exposure-zones guide.