Waynesville, GA
Waynesville wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Waynesville at the 77th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 158 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Waynesville at the 77th percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
Where Waynesville's buildings actually sit
Of Waynesville's 158 counted buildings, 96.2% 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.
How Waynesville compares
Waynesville scores 77th nationally and 86th within Georgia — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Waynesville ranks 7,248 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 26,519 by building count (1 is largest). Within Georgia alone, it ranks 99 of 669 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Georgia on its state page.
Waynesville and the insurance market
Waynesville's 77th-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 Waynesville
Because Direct exposure dominates in Waynesville (96.2%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Waynesville's 77th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Waynesville, see the exposure-zones guide.