Hernandez, NM
How exposed is Hernandez to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Hernandez lands at the 85th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 489 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Hernandez at the 80th national percentile — 4 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Indirect exposure is dominant in Hernandez (54.8% of 489 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 45.2% sit in the Direct zone.
How Hernandez compares
Inside New Mexico, Hernandez sits at just the 61st percentile even though it scores 85th 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, Hernandez ranks 4,899 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17,553 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 194 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
Hernandez and the insurance market
Hernandez's 85th-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.
Hardening a home in Hernandez
Because 54.8% of Hernandez's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Hernandez's 4,899-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Hernandez, see the exposure-zones guide.