Wakarusa, KS
Wakarusa wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Wakarusa at the 70th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 234 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 Wakarusa at the 70th percentile, close to its 70th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
234 buildings are counted in Wakarusa, and 97.9% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 2.1% rated Minimal.
Wakarusa against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Wakarusa's 70th national percentile and its 67th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Wakarusa ranks 9,518 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 23,664 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 239 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Wakarusa's 70th-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 Direct exposure dominates in Wakarusa (97.9%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Wakarusa's 9,518-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Wakarusa, see the exposure-zones guide.