Swansea, SC
How exposed is Swansea to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Swansea lands at the 69th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 566 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Swansea at the 68th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Swansea's buildings (52.7%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Swansea compares
Swansea's 69th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 52nd ranking inside South Carolina does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 16 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Swansea ranks 9,908 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,317 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 227 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Swansea
Swansea's 69th-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
Because 52.7% of Swansea's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 566 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Swansea. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Swansea, see the exposure-zones guide.