Odessa, NE
Odessa wildfire risk explained
Odessa's 108 buildings earn a 77th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Odessa at the 69th percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Odessa's buildings (56.5%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Odessa compares
Odessa scores 77th nationally and 81st within Nebraska — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Odessa ranks 7,314 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,702 by building count (1 is largest). Within Nebraska alone, it ranks 113 of 583 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Nebraska on its state page.
Odessa and the insurance market
Odessa's 77th-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
Odessa's 56.5% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Odessa's 7,314-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Odessa, see the exposure-zones guide.