Ozark, MO
How exposed is Ozark to wildfire?
Ozark sits at the 71st percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 7,140 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Ozark's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 73rd percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Ozark rates 55% Minimal exposure against just 20.5% Direct and 24.6% Indirect — of 7,140 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 7,140 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Ozark against the rest of the country
Ozark's risk sits at a similar level relative to Missouri (83rd percentile statewide) as it does nationally (71st) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ozark ranks 9,231 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,402 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 179 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
Ozark and the insurance market
Ozark'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
With 55% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Ozark gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Ozark's 9,231-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Ozark, see the exposure-zones guide.