Thunderbolt, GA
Thunderbolt wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Thunderbolt lands at the 85th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 1,303 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Thunderbolt at the 76th national percentile — 8 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Thunderbolt's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 57.3% of Thunderbolt's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 30.4% Direct and 12.4% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Thunderbolt compares
There's little gap between Thunderbolt's 85th national percentile and its 96th percentile inside Georgia, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Thunderbolt ranks 4,888 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,068 by building count (1 is largest). Within Georgia alone, it ranks 31 of 669 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Georgia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Thunderbolt
At the 85th percentile nationally, Thunderbolt carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
Thunderbolt's 57.3% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Thunderbolt's 4,888-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Thunderbolt, see the exposure-zones guide.