Ward, SC
Ward wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Ward at the 69th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 121 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Ward at the 70th percentile, close to its 69th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Ward's 121 counted buildings, 87.6% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where Ward ranks
Inside South Carolina, Ward sits at just the 52nd percentile even though it scores 69th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ward ranks 9,937 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,130 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 230 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Ward
Ward's 69th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 87.6% of Ward in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Ward's 9,937-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Ward, see the exposure-zones guide.