Mountain City, TN
Mountain City wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Mountain City at the 73rd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 1,570 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 Mountain City at the 76th percentile, close to its 73rd-percentile risk score.
Mountain City's building exposure, zone by zone
1,570 buildings are counted in Mountain City, and 69.8% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
Mountain City against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Mountain City's 73rd national percentile and its 73rd percentile inside Tennessee, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mountain City ranks 8,388 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,887 by building count (1 is largest). Within Tennessee alone, it ranks 139 of 502 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Tennessee on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Mountain City
Mountain City's 73rd-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because Direct exposure dominates in Mountain City (69.8%), 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,570 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Mountain City. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Mountain City, see the exposure-zones guide.