Elk City, OK
Elk City, OK's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Elk City at the 92nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 7,245 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Elk City at the 92nd percentile, close to its 92nd-percentile risk score.
Where Elk City's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 72.6% of Elk City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 19.3% Direct and 8.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,245 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Elk City compares
Elk City's 92nd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 58th ranking inside Oklahoma does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 34 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Elk City ranks 2,526 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,365 by building count (1 is largest). Within Oklahoma alone, it ranks 352 of 834 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Oklahoma on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Elk City's 92nd-percentile, very 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 72.6% of Elk City 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,245 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Elk City. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Elk City, see the exposure-zones guide.