Plains, KS
Plains, KS's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Plains at the 39th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 697 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Plains at the 36th national percentile — 4 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Plains's buildings actually sit
Only 17.7% of Plains's 697 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 82.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Plains against the rest of the country
Plains's 39th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 15th ranking inside Kansas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 24 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Plains ranks 19,157 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,689 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 611 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Plains's moderate wildfire rating (39th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Plains's 82.4% 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.
More on how this number was built
Plains's 39th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Plains, see the exposure-zones guide.