Porters Neck, NC
Porters Neck, NC's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Porters Neck at the 82nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 3,128 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Porters Neck at the 78th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 53.6% of Porters Neck's buildings as Direct exposure, higher than its 43.8% Indirect share and far above its 2.7% Minimal share — a profile where 1,675 structures sit close enough to vegetation that lot clearing matters most.
How Porters Neck compares
Porters Neck's risk sits at a similar level relative to North Carolina (88th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (82nd) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Porters Neck ranks 5,804 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,256 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Carolina alone, it ranks 95 of 772 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Carolina on its state page.
Porters Neck and the insurance market
Porters Neck's 82nd-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
Porters Neck's 53.6% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 3,128 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Porters Neck. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Porters Neck, see the exposure-zones guide.