Pierce, NE
Pierce wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Pierce at the 65th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 1,038 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Pierce at the 55th national percentile — 11 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Pierce rates 90.4% Minimal exposure against just 9.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 1,038 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Pierce compares
Pierce's risk sits at a similar level relative to Nebraska (58th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (65th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pierce ranks 10,973 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,671 by building count (1 is largest). Within Nebraska alone, it ranks 243 of 583 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Nebraska on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Pierce
Pierce's 65th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Pierce's 90.4% 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 Pierce's figures come from
Pierce's 65th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Pierce's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.