Palouse, WA
Palouse wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Palouse at the 35th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 765 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Palouse at the 35th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Palouse's buildings actually sit
Palouse rates 81.7% Minimal exposure against just 18.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 765 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Palouse compares
Within Washington, Palouse ranks higher (54th percentile) than it does nationally (35th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palouse ranks 20,503 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,970 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 290 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Palouse and the insurance market
Palouse's moderate wildfire rating (35th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Palouse's 81.7% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where Palouse's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palouse's 20,503-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Palouse's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.