Waynesboro, MS
How exposed is Waynesboro to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Waynesboro lands at the 75th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 2,829 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Waynesboro's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 77th percentile nationally.
Where Waynesboro's buildings actually sit
Direct exposure dominates in Waynesboro: 58.7% of its 2,829 buildings, versus 40.7% Indirect and 0.6% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
How Waynesboro compares
There's little gap between Waynesboro's 75th national percentile and its 72nd percentile inside Mississippi, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Waynesboro ranks 7,757 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,701 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 117 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Waynesboro
Waynesboro's 75th-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.
Hardening a home in Waynesboro
Waynesboro's 58.7% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Waynesboro's 7,757-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Waynesboro, see the exposure-zones guide.