Soldier, IA
How exposed is Soldier to wildfire?
USFS scores Soldier at the 66th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 200 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Soldier at the 65th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Soldier's buildings actually sit
Soldier rates 77% Minimal exposure against just 23% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 200 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Soldier compares
Compare Soldier'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, Soldier ranks 10,617 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,836 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 103 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Soldier's high rating (66th 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 77% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Soldier 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Soldier's 10,617-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Soldier, see the exposure-zones guide.