Carthage, MO
Carthage, MO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Carthage at the 64th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 7,029 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Carthage at the 66th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Carthage's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 82.7% of Carthage's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 14.1% Direct and 3.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,029 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Carthage compares
There's little gap between Carthage's 64th national percentile and its 68th percentile inside Missouri, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Carthage ranks 11,226 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,438 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 346 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Carthage's high rating (64th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 82.7% of Carthage outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,029 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Carthage. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Carthage, see the exposure-zones guide.