Harvey Cedars, NJ
Harvey Cedars, NJ's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Harvey Cedars at the 89th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 1,241 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Harvey Cedars at the 81st percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
Harvey Cedars's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 99.8% of Harvey Cedars's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.2% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Harvey Cedars against the rest of the country
Harvey Cedars's risk sits at a similar level relative to New Jersey (94th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (89th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Harvey Cedars ranks 3,592 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,399 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Jersey alone, it ranks 42 of 700 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Jersey on its state page.
Harvey Cedars and the insurance market
Harvey Cedars's 89th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 99.8% of Harvey Cedars 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,241 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Harvey Cedars. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Harvey Cedars, see the exposure-zones guide.