Sweetwater, TX
Sweetwater wildfire risk explained
Sweetwater 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 6,626 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Sweetwater's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 90th percentile nationally.
Where Sweetwater's buildings actually sit
6,626 buildings are counted in Sweetwater, and 66% of them are Indirect exposure — ember-driven risk rather than the 12.4% in Direct exposure or the 21.6% rated Minimal. At 6,626 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sweetwater compares
There's little gap between Sweetwater'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, Sweetwater ranks 2,880 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,613 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 256 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Sweetwater's 91st-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 66% of Sweetwater'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.
Where Sweetwater's figures come from
Sweetwater'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 Sweetwater's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.