Diagonal, IA
Diagonal, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Diagonal at the 68th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 256 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Diagonal at the 69th national percentile — 1 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
72.7% of Diagonal's 256 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 27.3% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
Diagonal against the rest of the country
Within Iowa, Diagonal ranks higher (92nd percentile) than it does nationally (68th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Diagonal ranks 9,986 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,938 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 78 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Diagonal
Diagonal's 68th-percentile, 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
Even with 72.7% of Diagonal outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Diagonal's 9,986-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Diagonal, see the exposure-zones guide.