Huron, SD
How exposed is Huron to wildfire?
USFS scores Huron at the 67th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 7,018 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 Huron at the 66th percentile, close to its 67th-percentile risk score.
Huron's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 51.5% of Huron's 7,018 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 13% Direct and 35.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 7,018 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Huron ranks
Huron's risk sits at a similar level relative to South Dakota (62nd percentile statewide) as it does nationally (67th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Huron ranks 10,313 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,452 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 169 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Huron and the insurance market
At the 67th percentile nationally, Huron carries the high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 51.5% of Huron'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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Huron's 10,313-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Huron, see the exposure-zones guide.