Shrewsbury, WV
How exposed is Shrewsbury to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Shrewsbury at the 92nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 314 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Shrewsbury at the 93rd national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Shrewsbury's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 89.2% of Shrewsbury's 314 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 9.6% Direct and 1.3% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Where Shrewsbury ranks
Shrewsbury's risk sits at a similar level relative to West Virginia (86th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (92nd) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Shrewsbury ranks 2,664 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,271 by building count (1 is largest). Within West Virginia alone, it ranks 62 of 429 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for West Virginia on its state page.
Shrewsbury and the insurance market
Shrewsbury's 92nd-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Shrewsbury's 89.2% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Shrewsbury's 92nd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Shrewsbury, see the exposure-zones guide.