Hiawassee, GA
How exposed is Hiawassee to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Hiawassee lands at the 71st percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 786 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Hiawassee at the 74th percentile, close to its 71st-percentile risk score.
Hiawassee's building exposure, zone by zone
Of Hiawassee's 786 counted buildings, 56.2% carry Direct exposure and only 5% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Hiawassee against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Hiawassee's 71st national percentile and its 69th percentile inside Georgia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hiawassee ranks 9,045 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,756 by building count (1 is largest). Within Georgia alone, it ranks 208 of 669 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Georgia on its state page.
Hiawassee and the insurance market
Hiawassee's high rating (71st percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because Direct exposure dominates in Hiawassee (56.2%), 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 Hiawassee's 9,045-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Hiawassee, see the exposure-zones guide.