Ship Bottom, NJ
How exposed is Ship Bottom to wildfire?
USFS scores Ship Bottom at the 86th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 2,041 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Ship Bottom at the 77th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
Ship Bottom's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 0.1% of Ship Bottom's 2,041 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 100% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Where Ship Bottom ranks
Ship Bottom's risk sits at a similar level relative to New Jersey (91st percentile statewide) as it does nationally (86th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ship Bottom ranks 4,578 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,351 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Jersey alone, it ranks 68 of 700 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Jersey on its state page.
Ship Bottom and the insurance market
Ship Bottom's very high rating (86th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Ship Bottom's 100% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Ship Bottom's 86th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Ship Bottom, see the exposure-zones guide.