Ricketts, IA
How exposed is Ricketts to wildfire?
USFS scores Ricketts at the 31st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 94 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Ricketts at the 29th percentile, close to its 31st-percentile risk score.
Ricketts's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 67% of Ricketts's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 33% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Ricketts against the rest of the country
Within Iowa, Ricketts ranks higher (46th percentile) than it does nationally (31st) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ricketts ranks 21,613 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 29,306 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 546 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Ricketts and the insurance market
Ricketts's moderate rating (31st percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Ricketts's 67% 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
Ricketts's 31st-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 Ricketts, see the exposure-zones guide.