Square Butte, MT
Square Butte wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Square Butte at the 75th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 33 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Square Butte at the 72nd percentile, close to its 75th-percentile risk score.
Square Butte's building exposure, zone by zone
57.6% of Square Butte's 33 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 42.4% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone.
How Square Butte compares
Inside Montana, Square Butte sits at just the 46th percentile even though it scores 75th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Square Butte ranks 7,918 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 31,317 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 259 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Square Butte's 75th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 57.6% of Square Butte'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
Square Butte's 75th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Square Butte, see the exposure-zones guide.