Palm Bay, FL
Palm Bay wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Palm Bay at the 96th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 46,707 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 Palm Bay at the 97th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
45.1% of Palm Bay's 46,707 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 33.1% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 46,707 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Palm Bay against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Palm Bay's 96th national percentile and its 96th percentile inside Florida, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palm Bay ranks 1,163 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 194 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 41 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Palm Bay
Palm Bay's very high rating (96th 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.
Hardening a home in Palm Bay
With 45.1% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Palm Bay gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Palm Bay's 96th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palm Bay, see the exposure-zones guide.