Nickelsville, VA
Nickelsville, VA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Nickelsville's 285 buildings earn a 79th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Nickelsville's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 82nd percentile nationally.
Nickelsville's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 62.1% of Nickelsville's 285 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 37.9% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Nickelsville against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Nickelsville's 79th national percentile and its 92nd percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Nickelsville ranks 6,792 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,047 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 59 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Nickelsville and the insurance market
Nickelsville's 79th-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 62.1% of Nickelsville'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 Nickelsville's 6,792-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Nickelsville, see the exposure-zones guide.