Gillett Grove, IA
How exposed is Gillett Grove to wildfire?
USFS scores Gillett Grove at the 48th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 66 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Gillett Grove at the 48th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Gillett Grove's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 60.6% of Gillett Grove's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 39.4% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Gillett Grove compares
Within Iowa, Gillett Grove ranks higher (66th percentile) than it does nationally (48th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gillett Grove ranks 16,383 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 30,416 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 344 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
Gillett Grove's elevated wildfire rating (48th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Gillett Grove's 60.6% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gillett Grove's 16,383-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Gillett Grove, see the exposure-zones guide.