Vidalia, GA
How exposed is Vidalia to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Vidalia at the 66th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 5,260 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Vidalia at the 65th national percentile — 1 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 Vidalia's buildings (55.9%) 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 5,260 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Vidalia ranks
Vidalia's 66th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 47th ranking inside Georgia does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 19 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Vidalia ranks 10,806 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,279 by building count (1 is largest). Within Georgia alone, it ranks 364 of 669 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Georgia on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Vidalia
Vidalia's 66th-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 Vidalia (55.9% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Vidalia's figures come from
Vidalia's 66th-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 Vidalia's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.