Rapid City, SD
Rapid City wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Rapid City at the 89th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 29,308 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Rapid City at the 90th national percentile — 0 points above 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 51.5% of Rapid City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 14.4% Direct and 34.2% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 29,308 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Rapid City compares
Rapid City scores 89th nationally and 92nd within South Dakota — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rapid City ranks 3,386 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 398 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 36 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Rapid City
Rapid City's very high rating (89th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 51.5% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Rapid City gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Rapid City's 89th-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 Rapid City, see the exposure-zones guide.