Palm River-Clair Mel, FL
How exposed is Palm River-Clair Mel to wildfire?
USFS scores Palm River-Clair Mel at the 74th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 9,427 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Palm River-Clair Mel's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 73rd percentile nationally.
Palm River-Clair Mel's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 24.5% of Palm River-Clair Mel's 9,427 buildings carry Direct exposure and 14.7% carry Indirect; the remaining 60.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 9,427 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Palm River-Clair Mel compares
Inside Florida, Palm River-Clair Mel sits at just the 33rd percentile even though it scores 74th 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, Palm River-Clair Mel ranks 8,318 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,731 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 637 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Palm River-Clair Mel's 74th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 60.9% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Palm River-Clair Mel 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 River-Clair Mel's 74th-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 River-Clair Mel, see the exposure-zones guide.