Lake St. Louis, MO
Lake St. Louis wildfire risk explained
Lake St. Louis sits at the 49th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,568 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 Lake St. Louis at the 51st percentile, close to its 49th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
75.9% of Lake St. Louis's 5,568 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 10.2% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 5,568 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Lake St. Louis ranks
Inside Missouri, Lake St. Louis sits at just the 30th percentile even though it scores 49th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lake St. Louis ranks 16,202 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,094 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 745 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Lake St. Louis
Lake St. Louis's elevated wildfire rating (49th 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
Even with 75.9% of Lake St. Louis 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 Lake St. Louis's 16,202-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Lake St. Louis, see the exposure-zones guide.