Cherokee, KS
Cherokee wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Cherokee at the 56th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 555 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Cherokee at the 57th percentile, close to its 56th-percentile risk score.
Cherokee's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 35.1% of Cherokee's 555 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 64.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Where Cherokee ranks
There's little gap between Cherokee's 56th national percentile and its 45th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cherokee ranks 13,704 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,496 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 395 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
Cherokee's elevated wildfire rating (56th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Cherokee's 64.9% 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
Cherokee's 56th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Cherokee, see the exposure-zones guide.