Johnston, IA
How exposed is Johnston to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Johnston at the 40th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 7,401 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Johnston's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 42nd percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 51.2% of Johnston's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 25.7% Direct and 23.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,401 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Johnston against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Johnston's 40th national percentile and its 55th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Johnston ranks 19,002 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,303 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 463 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Johnston and the insurance market
Johnston's moderate wildfire rating (40th 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 Johnston
With 51.2% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Johnston gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Johnston's 19,002-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Johnston, see the exposure-zones guide.