Odessa, FL
Odessa wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Odessa lands at the 88th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 3,122 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Odessa at the 88th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Odessa's buildings actually sit
Of Odessa's 3,122 counted buildings, 50.5% carry Direct exposure and only 2.1% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Odessa against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Odessa's 88th national percentile and its 74th percentile inside Florida, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Odessa ranks 3,874 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,260 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 252 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Odessa
Odessa's 88th-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
Because Direct exposure dominates in Odessa (50.5%), 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Odessa's 3,874-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Odessa, see the exposure-zones guide.