Mount Pleasant, SC
How exposed is Mount Pleasant to wildfire?
USFS scores Mount Pleasant at the 91st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 32,559 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Mount Pleasant's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 86th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Indirect exposure is dominant in Mount Pleasant (48.1% of 32,559 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 27.8% sit in the Direct zone. At 32,559 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Mount Pleasant compares
There's little gap between Mount Pleasant's 91st national percentile and its 98th percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mount Pleasant ranks 2,905 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 337 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 11 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Mount Pleasant
Mount Pleasant's 91st-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Mount Pleasant's 48.1% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Mount Pleasant's 91st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Mount Pleasant, see the exposure-zones guide.