De Kalb, MS
De Kalb wildfire risk explained
USFS scores De Kalb at the 60th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 671 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, De Kalb's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 62nd percentile nationally.
Where De Kalb's buildings actually sit
Direct exposure dominates in De Kalb: 72.9% of its 671 buildings, versus 27.1% Indirect and 0% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
How De Kalb compares
Inside Mississippi, De Kalb sits at just the 35th percentile even though it scores 60th 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, De Kalb ranks 12,575 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,959 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 274 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
De Kalb and the insurance market
De Kalb's 60th-percentile, 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.
Hardening a home in De Kalb
De Kalb's 72.9% 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.
More on how this number was built
De Kalb's 60th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond De Kalb, see the exposure-zones guide.