Prairie City, IA
Prairie City, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Prairie City's 890 buildings earn a 41st-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Prairie City at the 41st national percentile — 1 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
USFS classifies 90.7% of Prairie City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 9.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Prairie City compares
Compare Prairie City's two percentiles: 57th within Iowa, only 41st nationally — a gap of 15 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Prairie City ranks 18,461 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,809 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 438 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Prairie City and the insurance market
Prairie City's elevated rating (41st percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Prairie City
With 90.7% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Prairie City gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Prairie City's figures come from
Prairie City's 41st-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 Prairie City's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.