Salem, VA
How exposed is Salem to wildfire?
Salem sits at the 62nd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 11,007 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Salem at the 61st percentile, close to its 62nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Salem's buildings (56.5%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 11,007 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Salem against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Salem's 62nd national percentile and its 70th percentile inside Virginia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Salem ranks 11,962 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,441 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 206 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
Salem's 62nd-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
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Salem (56.5% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Salem's figures come from
Salem's 62nd-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 Salem's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.