Liberal, KS
How exposed is Liberal to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Liberal at the 85th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 7,853 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Liberal at the 84th percentile, close to its 85th-percentile risk score.
Liberal's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 76.7% of Liberal's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 8.3% Direct and 15% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,853 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Liberal ranks
There's little gap between Liberal's 85th national percentile and its 85th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Liberal ranks 4,788 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,161 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 111 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
Liberal and the insurance market
Liberal's 85th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 76.7% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Liberal gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Liberal's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Liberal's 4,788-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Liberal's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.