Promise City, IA
Promise City, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Promise City sits at the 66th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 114 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Promise City at the 68th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Promise City's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Promise City's buildings (65.8%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Promise City compares
Compare Promise City's two percentiles: 90th within Iowa, only 66th nationally — a gap of 24 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Promise City ranks 10,587 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,451 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 102 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Promise City and the insurance market
Promise City's 66th-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.
Hardening a home in Promise City
Because 65.8% of Promise City's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 114 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Promise City. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Promise City, see the exposure-zones guide.