Paris, MS
Paris wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Paris at the 74th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 142 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Paris's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 76th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Paris's 142 counted buildings, 100% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Paris compares
Paris's risk sits at a similar level relative to Mississippi (68th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (74th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Paris ranks 8,355 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,212 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 135 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Paris and the insurance market
Paris'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.
Hardening a home in Paris
Paris's 100% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Paris's 8,355-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Paris, see the exposure-zones guide.