Crooks, SD
How exposed is Crooks to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Crooks lands at the 33rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 585 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Crooks's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 32nd percentile nationally.
Crooks's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 75% of Crooks's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 25% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Crooks compares
Crooks's 33rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 6th ranking inside South Dakota does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 27 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Crooks ranks 21,066 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,035 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 411 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Crooks and the insurance market
Crooks's moderate wildfire rating (33rd 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
Crooks's 75% 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
Crooks's 33rd-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 Crooks, see the exposure-zones guide.