Olney Springs, CO
Olney Springs, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Olney Springs at the 71st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 250 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Olney Springs's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 70th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Olney Springs's buildings (83.2%) 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.
Where Olney Springs ranks
Inside Colorado, Olney Springs sits at just the 38th percentile even though it scores 71st 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, Olney Springs ranks 9,105 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 23,130 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 291 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Olney Springs and the insurance market
Olney Springs's 71st-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
Because 83.2% of Olney Springs's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Olney Springs's 71st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Olney Springs, see the exposure-zones guide.