Helena, SC
Helena wildfire risk explained
Helena sits at the 62nd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 533 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Helena at the 65th percentile, close to its 62nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Helena's 533 counted buildings, 67% 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.
Helena against the rest of the country
Inside South Carolina, Helena sits at just the 26th percentile even though it scores 62nd 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, Helena ranks 11,928 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,830 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 352 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Helena and the insurance market
Helena's 62nd-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because Direct exposure dominates in Helena (67%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Helena's 11,928-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Helena, see the exposure-zones guide.