Indianola, MS
How exposed is Indianola to wildfire?
USFS scores Indianola at the 24th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 4,341 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Indianola at the 24th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Indianola's buildings actually sit
Only 25% of Indianola's 4,341 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 75.1% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Indianola compares
Indianola's 24th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 8th ranking inside Mississippi does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 17 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Indianola ranks 23,836 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,941 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 388 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Indianola's moderate wildfire rating (24th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Indianola's 75.1% 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 Indianola's 23,836-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Indianola, see the exposure-zones guide.