Canistota, SD
Canistota wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Canistota lands at the 15th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 405 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Canistota at the 12th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Canistota's buildings actually sit
Canistota rates 73.1% Minimal exposure against just 26.9% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 405 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Canistota compares
There's little gap between Canistota's 15th national percentile and its 1st percentile inside South Dakota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Canistota ranks 26,927 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 19,126 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 436 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 15th national percentile, Canistota rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Hardening a home in Canistota
Canistota's 73.1% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Canistota's 26,927-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Canistota, see the exposure-zones guide.