Silver City, NM
Silver City, NM's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Silver City's 5,823 buildings earn a 87th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Silver City at the 81st percentile, close to its 87th-percentile risk score.
Where Silver City's buildings actually sit
USFS puts 86% of Silver City's 5,823 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 14% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 5,823 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Silver City ranks
Silver City's 87th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 68th ranking inside New Mexico does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 20 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Silver City ranks 4,045 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,959 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 160 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
Silver City and the insurance market
Silver City's 87th-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
Silver City's 86% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,823 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Silver City. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Silver City, see the exposure-zones guide.