Latham, KS
How exposed is Latham to wildfire?
Latham sits at the 96th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 124 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Latham at the 94th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Latham's buildings actually sit
Of Latham's 124 counted buildings, 62.1% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Latham against the rest of the country
Latham scores 96th nationally and 98th within Kansas — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Latham ranks 1,166 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 27,987 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 17 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
Latham and the insurance market
Latham's 96th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in Latham
Latham's 62.1% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Latham's 1,166-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Latham, see the exposure-zones guide.