Lake Station, IN
How exposed is Lake Station to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Lake Station lands at the 53rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 6,708 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Lake Station at the 55th percentile, close to its 53rd-percentile risk score.
Lake Station's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 91.3% of Lake Station's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 6.6% Direct and 2% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 6,708 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Lake Station against the rest of the country
Compare Lake Station's two percentiles: 98th within Indiana, only 53rd nationally — a gap of 45 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lake Station ranks 14,680 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,582 by building count (1 is largest). Within Indiana alone, it ranks 16 of 967 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Indiana on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Lake Station's elevated rating (53rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Lake Station's 91.3% 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.
Where Lake Station's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 6,708 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Lake Station. The exposure-zones guide covers what Lake Station's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.