Altoona, IA
Altoona, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Altoona's 7,462 buildings earn a 27th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Altoona at the 28th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Altoona's building exposure, zone by zone
Altoona rates 87% Minimal exposure against just 13% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 7,462 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 7,462 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Altoona ranks
Altoona's risk sits at a similar level relative to Iowa (41st percentile statewide) as it does nationally (27th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Altoona ranks 23,062 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,288 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 598 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Altoona's moderate rating (27th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Altoona
With 87% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Altoona gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Altoona's 23,062-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Altoona, see the exposure-zones guide.