Wells, KS
How exposed is Wells to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Wells lands at the 87th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 73 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Wells at the 84th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
73 buildings are counted in Wells, and 53.4% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Wells compares
There's little gap between Wells's 87th national percentile and its 88th percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Wells ranks 3,967 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 30,172 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 90 of 721 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Kansas on its state page.
Wells and the insurance market
Wells's 87th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
Wells's 53.4% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Wells's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Wells's 3,967-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Wells's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.