Port Royal, SC
How exposed is Port Royal to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Port Royal at the 88th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 2,948 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Port Royal at the 82nd percentile, close to its 88th-percentile risk score.
Port Royal's building exposure, zone by zone
2,948 buildings are counted in Port Royal, and 53.3% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 22.2% rated Minimal.
Port Royal against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Port Royal's 88th national percentile and its 95th percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Port Royal ranks 3,662 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,517 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 25 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Port Royal and the insurance market
Port Royal's 88th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Port Royal's 53.3% 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.
Where Port Royal's figures come from
Port Royal's 88th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Port Royal's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.