Carol Stream, IL
Carol Stream wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Carol Stream at the 30th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 8,972 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Carol Stream at the 30th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Carol Stream's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 0.5% of Carol Stream's 8,972 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 99.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 8,972 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Carol Stream against the rest of the country
Carol Stream's 80th-percentile standing inside Illinois outpaces its 30th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Carol Stream ranks 21,926 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,855 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 283 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Carol Stream
At the 30th national percentile, Carol Stream rates moderate for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Carol Stream's 99.5% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Carol Stream's 30th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Carol Stream, see the exposure-zones guide.