Blue Rapids, KS
Blue Rapids wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Blue Rapids at the 86th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 725 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 Blue Rapids at the 80th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 72.4% of Blue Rapids's 725 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 27.6% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Blue Rapids compares
There's little gap between Blue Rapids's 86th national percentile and its 86th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Blue Rapids ranks 4,539 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,390 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 103 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Blue Rapids's 86th-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 Blue Rapids (72.4% 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 Blue Rapids's 4,539-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Blue Rapids, see the exposure-zones guide.