Cow Creek, SD
Cow Creek wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Cow Creek at the 52nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 115 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Cow Creek's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 45th percentile nationally.
Cow Creek's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 20.9% of Cow Creek's 115 buildings carry Direct exposure and 4.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 74.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Cow Creek compares
Inside South Dakota, Cow Creek sits at just the 32nd percentile even though it scores 52nd nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cow Creek ranks 15,302 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,426 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 298 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Cow Creek and the insurance market
Cow Creek's elevated wildfire rating (52nd 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 74.8% of Cow Creek 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Cow Creek's 15,302-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Cow Creek, see the exposure-zones guide.