Tomball, TX
How exposed is Tomball to wildfire?
USFS scores Tomball at the 65th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 4,612 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Tomball's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 67th percentile nationally.
Where Tomball's buildings actually sit
USFS puts 45.7% of Tomball's 4,612 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 20.8% Direct and 33.5% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Tomball compares
Tomball's 65th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 22nd ranking inside Texas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 44 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tomball ranks 10,920 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,687 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 1,407 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Tomball and the insurance market
Tomball's 65th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Tomball's 45.7% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Tomball's 10,920-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Tomball, see the exposure-zones guide.