Heritage Lake, IL
Heritage Lake wildfire risk explained
Heritage Lake's 594 buildings earn a 17th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Heritage Lake's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 17th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Direct exposure dominates in Heritage Lake: 77.8% of its 594 buildings, versus 4% Indirect and 18.2% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap.
Where Heritage Lake ranks
Compare Heritage Lake's two percentiles: 56th within Illinois, only 17th nationally — a gap of 39 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Heritage Lake ranks 26,274 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 15,908 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 642 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Heritage Lake and the insurance market
Heritage Lake's low wildfire rating (17th 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.
Hardening a home in Heritage Lake
Heritage Lake's 77.8% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Heritage Lake's 26,274-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Heritage Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.