Defiance, IA
How exposed is Defiance to wildfire?
USFS scores Defiance at the 23rd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 226 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Defiance at the 21st national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Defiance rates 80.1% Minimal exposure against just 19.9% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 226 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Defiance against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Defiance's 23rd national percentile and its 36th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Defiance ranks 24,325 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 23,912 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 651 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Defiance's moderate rating (23rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
With 80.1% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Defiance gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Defiance's 23rd-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 Defiance, see the exposure-zones guide.