Pelican Bay, FL
Pelican Bay wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Pelican Bay at the 73rd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 1,927 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Pelican Bay at the 77th national percentile — 4 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Pelican Bay rates 94.5% Minimal exposure against just 5.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 1,927 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Pelican Bay against the rest of the country
Pelican Bay's 73rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 33rd ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 40 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pelican Bay ranks 8,373 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,689 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 639 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Pelican Bay
Pelican Bay's 73rd-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
With 94.5% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Pelican 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pelican Bay's 8,373-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Pelican Bay, see the exposure-zones guide.