Joice, IA
How exposed is Joice to wildfire?
Joice sits at the 11th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 153 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Joice at the 8th percentile, close to its 11th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 83% of Joice's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 17% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Joice compares
There's little gap between Joice's 11th national percentile and its 20th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Joice ranks 28,045 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 26,745 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 809 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Joice and the insurance market
Joice's low wildfire rating (11th 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.
Hardening a home in Joice
Even with 83% of Joice 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 153 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Joice. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Joice, see the exposure-zones guide.