Fort Pierre, SD
Fort Pierre, SD's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Fort Pierre sits at the 78th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 1,523 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Fort Pierre at the 76th percentile, close to its 78th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 90% of Fort Pierre's 1,523 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 8.9% Direct and 1.1% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Fort Pierre against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Fort Pierre's 78th national percentile and its 77th percentile inside South Dakota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Fort Pierre ranks 6,812 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 9,071 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 100 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Fort Pierre and the insurance market
Fort Pierre's 78th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 90% of Fort Pierre's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,523 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Fort Pierre. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Fort Pierre, see the exposure-zones guide.