Watrous, NM
Watrous wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Watrous lands at the 89th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 80 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Watrous at the 88th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Watrous's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 53.8% of Watrous's 80 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 46.3% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Watrous compares
Inside New Mexico, Watrous sits at just the 72nd percentile even though it scores 89th 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, Watrous ranks 3,594 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 29,889 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 142 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
Watrous and the insurance market
Watrous's 89th-percentile, very 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 Watrous (53.8% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Watrous's 3,594-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Watrous, see the exposure-zones guide.