North Myrtle Beach, SC
North Myrtle Beach wildfire risk explained
North Myrtle Beach sits at the 83rd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 12,760 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts North Myrtle Beach at the 76th percentile, close to its 83rd-percentile risk score.
Where North Myrtle Beach's buildings actually sit
North Myrtle Beach rates 50.7% Minimal exposure against just 18.2% Direct and 31% Indirect — of 12,760 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 12,760 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where North Myrtle Beach ranks
There's little gap between North Myrtle Beach's 83rd national percentile and its 90th 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, North Myrtle Beach ranks 5,493 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,198 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 49 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
North Myrtle Beach and the insurance market
North Myrtle Beach's very high rating (83rd 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.
What would actually reduce this score
North Myrtle Beach's 50.7% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where North Myrtle Beach's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,760 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for North Myrtle Beach. The exposure-zones guide covers what North Myrtle Beach's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.