Surfside Beach, SC
Surfside Beach wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Surfside Beach at the 61st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 2,998 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Surfside Beach at the 59th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Surfside Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
83.6% of Surfside Beach's 2,998 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 16.4% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
Where Surfside Beach ranks
Inside South Carolina, Surfside Beach sits at just the 20th percentile even though it scores 61st 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, Surfside Beach ranks 12,424 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,439 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 379 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Surfside Beach's 61st-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 83.6% of Surfside Beach 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 2,998 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Surfside Beach. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Surfside Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.