Yates Center, KS
How exposed is Yates Center to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Yates Center at the 91st national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 1,147 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 Yates Center at the 90th percentile, close to its 91st-percentile risk score.
Where Yates Center's buildings actually sit
Most of Yates Center's buildings (68.6%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
How Yates Center compares
There's little gap between Yates Center's 91st national percentile and its 92nd percentile inside Kansas, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Yates Center ranks 2,733 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,977 by building count (1 is largest). Within Kansas alone, it ranks 61 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
Yates Center's 91st-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Yates Center's 68.6% 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.
Where Yates Center's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Yates Center's 2,733-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Yates Center's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.