Kimberly, WV
How exposed is Kimberly to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Kimberly at the 90th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 201 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 Kimberly at the 92nd percentile, close to its 90th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Direct exposure dominates in Kimberly: 77.6% of its 201 buildings, versus 22.4% Indirect and 0% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
Where Kimberly ranks
There's little gap between Kimberly's 90th national percentile and its 83rd percentile inside West Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Kimberly ranks 3,041 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,825 by building count (1 is largest). Within West Virginia alone, it ranks 78 of 429 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for West Virginia on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 90th percentile nationally, Kimberly carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Kimberly's 77.6% 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 Kimberly's 3,041-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Kimberly, see the exposure-zones guide.