Orangeburg, SC
How exposed is Orangeburg to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Orangeburg at the 65th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 5,619 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 Orangeburg at the 65th percentile, close to its 65th-percentile risk score.
Where Orangeburg's buildings actually sit
USFS puts 58.4% of Orangeburg's 5,619 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 30.2% Direct and 11.4% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 5,619 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Orangeburg against the rest of the country
Inside South Carolina, Orangeburg sits at just the 33rd percentile even though it scores 65th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Orangeburg ranks 11,169 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,077 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 317 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Orangeburg's 65th-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.
Hardening a home in Orangeburg
Orangeburg's 58.4% 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.
Where Orangeburg's figures come from
Orangeburg's 65th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Orangeburg's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.