Grimes, IA
How exposed is Grimes to wildfire?
Grimes sits at the 31st percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,672 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Grimes at the 32nd percentile, close to its 31st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Grimes rates 69.5% Minimal exposure against just 9.5% Direct and 21% Indirect — of 5,672 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 5,672 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Grimes ranks
There's little gap between Grimes's 31st national percentile and its 46th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Grimes ranks 21,802 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,049 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 553 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
Grimes's moderate wildfire rating (31st 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
Even with 69.5% of Grimes 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,672 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Grimes. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Grimes, see the exposure-zones guide.