Medora, IL
How exposed is Medora to wildfire?
Medora sits at the 10th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 311 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Medora at the 10th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 66.6% of Medora's 311 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 3.9% Direct and 29.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Medora compares
Within Illinois, Medora ranks higher (44th percentile) than it does nationally (10th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Medora ranks 28,325 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,338 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 819 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Medora and the insurance market
Medora's low wildfire rating (10th 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
Because 66.6% of Medora's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Medora's 28,325-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Medora, see the exposure-zones guide.