Cedar Vale, KS
How exposed is Cedar Vale to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Cedar Vale at the 94th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 497 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 Cedar Vale at the 93rd percentile, close to its 94th-percentile risk score.
Cedar Vale's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 70.6% of Cedar Vale's 497 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 29.4% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Cedar Vale compares
There's little gap between Cedar Vale's 94th national percentile and its 96th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cedar Vale ranks 1,760 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17,404 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 33 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
Cedar Vale and the insurance market
At the 94th percentile nationally, Cedar Vale carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
Hardening a home in Cedar Vale
Because 70.6% of Cedar Vale's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
Where Cedar Vale's figures come from
Cedar Vale's 94th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Cedar Vale's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.