Colonial Pine Hills, SD
How exposed is Colonial Pine Hills to wildfire?
USFS scores Colonial Pine Hills at the 89th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 1,069 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 Colonial Pine Hills at the 90th percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Direct exposure dominates in Colonial Pine Hills: 81.3% of its 1,069 buildings, versus 18.7% Indirect and 0% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
How Colonial Pine Hills compares
There's little gap between Colonial Pine Hills's 89th national percentile and its 92nd 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, Colonial Pine Hills ranks 3,416 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,469 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 38 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Colonial Pine Hills
Colonial Pine Hills's 89th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Colonial Pine Hills's 81.3% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Colonial Pine Hills's figures come from
Colonial Pine Hills's 89th-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 Colonial Pine Hills's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.