Rural Retreat, VA
How exposed is Rural Retreat to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Rural Retreat at the 69th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 967 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 Rural Retreat at the 72nd percentile, close to its 69th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Rural Retreat's 967 counted buildings, 59.3% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Rural Retreat compares
Rural Retreat's risk sits at a similar level relative to Virginia (81st percentile statewide) as it does nationally (69th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rural Retreat ranks 9,851 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,175 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 130 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Rural Retreat's 69th-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
Because Direct exposure dominates in Rural Retreat (59.3%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Rural Retreat's 69th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Rural Retreat, see the exposure-zones guide.