Guthrie Center, IA
How exposed is Guthrie Center to wildfire?
USFS scores Guthrie Center at the 61st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 1,083 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 Guthrie Center at the 62nd percentile, close to its 61st-percentile risk score.
Where Guthrie Center's buildings actually sit
Guthrie Center rates 60.5% Minimal exposure against just 24.6% Direct and 15% Indirect — of 1,083 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Guthrie Center compares
Within Iowa, Guthrie Center ranks higher (85th percentile) than it does nationally (61st) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Guthrie Center ranks 12,260 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,389 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 158 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Guthrie Center and the insurance market
Guthrie Center's 61st-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
Guthrie Center's 60.5% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Guthrie Center's 12,260-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Guthrie Center, see the exposure-zones guide.