Osage Beach, MO
How exposed is Osage Beach to wildfire?
USFS scores Osage Beach at the 76th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 3,177 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Osage Beach at the 78th percentile, close to its 76th-percentile risk score.
Where Osage Beach's buildings actually sit
Most of Osage Beach's buildings (38.1%) 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.
Osage Beach against the rest of the country
Osage Beach's 92nd-percentile standing inside Missouri outpaces its 76th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Osage Beach ranks 7,660 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 5,194 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 88 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Osage Beach's 76th-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.
Hardening a home in Osage Beach
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Osage Beach (38.1% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Osage Beach's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Osage Beach's 7,660-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Osage Beach's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.