Truth or Consequences, NM
How exposed is Truth or Consequences to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Truth or Consequences at the 61st national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 5,060 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Truth or Consequences at the 61st national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Truth or Consequences's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Truth or Consequences's buildings (92%) 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. At 5,060 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Truth or Consequences ranks
Truth or Consequences's 61st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 32nd ranking inside New Mexico does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 29 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Truth or Consequences ranks 12,238 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,403 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 338 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
Truth or Consequences and the insurance market
Truth or Consequences's 61st-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
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Truth or Consequences (92% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,060 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Truth or Consequences. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Truth or Consequences, see the exposure-zones guide.