Carbondale, IL
How exposed is Carbondale to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Carbondale lands at the 36th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 7,911 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Carbondale at the 38th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 43% of Carbondale's 7,911 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 29.6% Direct and 27.5% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 7,911 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Carbondale compares
Compare Carbondale's two percentiles: 88th within Illinois, only 36th nationally — a gap of 52 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Carbondale ranks 20,256 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,145 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 177 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Carbondale's moderate wildfire rating (36th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Carbondale's 43% 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 Carbondale's 20,256-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Carbondale, see the exposure-zones guide.