Des Moines, IA
Des Moines, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Des Moines at the 50th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 95,856 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 Des Moines at the 52nd percentile, close to its 50th-percentile risk score.
Des Moines's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 87.7% of Des Moines's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 12.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 95,856 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Des Moines ranks
Within Iowa, Des Moines ranks higher (69th percentile) than it does nationally (50th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Des Moines ranks 15,750 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 69 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 318 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Des Moines and the insurance market
Des Moines's elevated wildfire rating (50th 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.
Hardening a home in Des Moines
Des Moines's 87.7% 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.
Where Des Moines's figures come from
Des Moines's 50th-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 Des Moines's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.