Panama City Beach, FL
Panama City Beach, FL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Panama City Beach sits at the 89th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 8,128 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Panama City Beach at the 87th percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
Panama City Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 80.7% of Panama City Beach's 8,128 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 6.7% Direct and 12.7% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 8,128 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Panama City Beach compares
Panama City Beach scores 89th nationally and 77th within Florida — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Panama City Beach ranks 3,557 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,064 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 219 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
Panama City Beach's 89th-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.
Hardening a home in Panama City Beach
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Panama City Beach (80.7% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 8,128 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Panama City Beach. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Panama City Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.