Ponca City, OK
Ponca City, OK's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Ponca City at the 96th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 13,132 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Ponca City at the 95th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Ponca City's buildings actually sit
92% of Ponca City's 13,132 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 7.9% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 13,132 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Ponca City against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Ponca City's 96th national percentile and its 84th percentile inside Oklahoma, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ponca City ranks 1,362 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,162 by building count (1 is largest). Within Oklahoma alone, it ranks 137 of 834 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Oklahoma on its state page.
Ponca City and the insurance market
Ponca City's very high rating (96th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
What would actually reduce this score
Ponca City's 92% 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 Ponca City's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 13,132 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Ponca City. The exposure-zones guide covers what Ponca City's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.