Palestine, TX
How exposed is Palestine to wildfire?
USFS scores Palestine at the 75th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 8,361 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Palestine's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 77th percentile nationally.
Palestine's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 54.6% of Palestine's 8,361 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 25% Direct and 20.4% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 8,361 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Palestine against the rest of the country
Palestine's 75th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 47th ranking inside Texas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 28 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palestine ranks 7,829 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,991 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 956 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Palestine's 75th-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
Palestine's 54.6% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palestine's 7,829-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Palestine, see the exposure-zones guide.