Rockaway Beach, MO
Rockaway Beach wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Rockaway Beach at the 72nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 479 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 Rockaway Beach at the 74th percentile, close to its 72nd-percentile risk score.
Rockaway Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 63.5% of Rockaway Beach's 479 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 33.4% Direct and 3.1% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Rockaway Beach against the rest of the country
Rockaway Beach's risk sits at a similar level relative to Missouri (85th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (72nd) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rockaway Beach ranks 8,955 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17,726 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 161 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Rockaway Beach
Rockaway Beach's 72nd-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 63.5% of Rockaway Beach'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.
Where Rockaway Beach's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Rockaway Beach's 8,955-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Rockaway Beach's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.