Surfside Beach, TX
How exposed is Surfside Beach to wildfire?
Surfside Beach sits at the 91st percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 1,205 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Surfside Beach at the 88th percentile, close to its 91st-percentile risk score.
Surfside Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
80.3% of Surfside Beach's 1,205 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 15.4% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
How Surfside Beach compares
There's little gap between Surfside Beach's 91st national percentile and its 86th percentile inside Texas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Surfside Beach ranks 2,910 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,621 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 261 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Surfside Beach and the insurance market
Surfside Beach's very high rating (91st 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.
Hardening a home in Surfside Beach
Surfside Beach's 80.3% 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.
Where Surfside Beach's figures come from
Surfside Beach's 91st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Surfside Beach's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.