Plum Creek, VA
Plum Creek, VA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Plum Creek at the 64th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 763 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Plum Creek's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 65th percentile nationally.
Plum Creek's building exposure, zone by zone
Indirect exposure is dominant in Plum Creek (51.5% of 763 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 48.5% sit in the Direct zone.
Where Plum Creek ranks
There's little gap between Plum Creek's 64th national percentile and its 73rd percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Plum Creek ranks 11,521 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,988 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 185 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Plum Creek
Plum Creek's 64th-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
Plum Creek's 51.5% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Plum Creek's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Plum Creek's 11,521-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Plum Creek's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.