St. Petersburg, FL
How exposed is St. Petersburg to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts St. Petersburg at the 63rd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 97,342 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 St. Petersburg at the 64th percentile, close to its 63rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 4% of St. Petersburg's 97,342 buildings carry Direct exposure and 4.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 91.2% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 97,342 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where St. Petersburg ranks
Inside Florida, St. Petersburg sits at just the 18th percentile even though it scores 63rd nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, St. Petersburg ranks 11,685 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 66 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 789 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
St. Petersburg and the insurance market
St. Petersburg's high rating (63rd 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
Even with 91.2% of St. Petersburg outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 97,342 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for St. Petersburg. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond St. Petersburg, see the exposure-zones guide.