Summit, SD
How exposed is Summit to wildfire?
USFS scores Summit at the 81st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 229 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Summit at the 78th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Summit's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 52.8% of Summit's 229 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 47.2% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
Where Summit ranks
There's little gap between Summit's 81st national percentile and its 81st percentile inside South Dakota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Summit ranks 6,090 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 23,836 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 86 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Summit and the insurance market
Summit's 81st-percentile, very 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 Summit
Summit's 52.8% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Summit's 6,090-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Summit, see the exposure-zones guide.