Jamestown, ND
How exposed is Jamestown to wildfire?
USFS scores Jamestown at the 56th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 8,199 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Jamestown at the 54th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Jamestown's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 8.8% of Jamestown's 8,199 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0.7% carry Indirect; the remaining 90.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 8,199 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Jamestown against the rest of the country
Jamestown's risk sits at a similar level relative to North Dakota (64th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (56th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Jamestown ranks 13,939 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,048 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Dakota alone, it ranks 144 of 402 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Dakota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Jamestown's elevated rating (56th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Jamestown
Even with 90.5% of Jamestown outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Jamestown's 13,939-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Jamestown, see the exposure-zones guide.