Starkweather, ND
Starkweather wildfire risk explained
Starkweather's 117 buildings earn a 61st-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Starkweather at the 57th national percentile — 4 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Starkweather's building exposure, zone by zone
Starkweather rates 68.4% Minimal exposure against just 31.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 117 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Where Starkweather ranks
Starkweather's 77th-percentile standing inside North Dakota outpaces its 61st national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Starkweather ranks 12,204 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,323 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Dakota alone, it ranks 93 of 402 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Dakota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Starkweather's 61st-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.
Hardening a home in Starkweather
Starkweather's 68.4% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Starkweather's 12,204-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Starkweather, see the exposure-zones guide.