Picayune, MS
How exposed is Picayune to wildfire?
USFS scores Picayune at the 92nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 5,785 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Picayune at the 93rd percentile, close to its 92nd-percentile risk score.
Picayune's building exposure, zone by zone
5,785 buildings are counted in Picayune, and 51.5% of them are Indirect exposure — ember-driven risk rather than the 47.3% in Direct exposure or the 1.2% rated Minimal. At 5,785 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Picayune compares
Picayune's risk sits at a similar level relative to Mississippi (94th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (92nd) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Picayune ranks 2,650 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,989 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 27 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Picayune and the insurance market
Picayune's 92nd-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 51.5% of Picayune's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
Where Picayune's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,785 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Picayune. The exposure-zones guide covers what Picayune's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.