Hazard, NE
How exposed is Hazard to wildfire?
USFS scores Hazard at the 71st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 80 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 Hazard at the 63rd percentile, close to its 71st-percentile risk score.
Where Hazard's buildings actually sit
Hazard rates 63.8% Minimal exposure against just 15% Direct and 21.3% Indirect — of 80 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Hazard compares
There's little gap between Hazard's 71st national percentile and its 70th percentile inside Nebraska, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hazard ranks 9,268 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 29,888 by building count (1 is largest). Within Nebraska alone, it ranks 172 of 583 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Nebraska on its state page.
Hazard and the insurance market
Hazard's 71st-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Hazard's 63.8% 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 Hazard's figures come from
Hazard's 71st-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 Hazard's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.