Howells, NE
How exposed is Howells to wildfire?
USFS scores Howells at the 35th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 477 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 Howells at the 27th percentile, close to its 35th-percentile risk score.
Where Howells's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 91% of Howells's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 9% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Howells against the rest of the country
Howells's 35th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 19th ranking inside Nebraska does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 16 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Howells ranks 20,577 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17,760 by building count (1 is largest). Within Nebraska alone, it ranks 472 of 583 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Nebraska on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Howells
Howells's moderate wildfire rating (35th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Howells's 91% 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 Howells's 20,577-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Howells, see the exposure-zones guide.