Oahe Acres, SD
Oahe Acres wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Oahe Acres at the 64th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 370 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Oahe Acres at the 58th national percentile — 7 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Oahe Acres's buildings actually sit
Of Oahe Acres's 370 counted buildings, 77.8% carry Direct exposure and only 22.2% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Oahe Acres compares
Oahe Acres's risk sits at a similar level relative to South Dakota (56th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (64th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Oahe Acres ranks 11,233 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 19,871 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 195 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Oahe Acres
Oahe Acres's 64th-percentile, 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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 77.8% of Oahe Acres in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Oahe Acres's 11,233-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Oahe Acres, see the exposure-zones guide.