Melrose Park, IL
Melrose Park, IL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Melrose Park's 8,003 buildings earn a 33rd-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Melrose Park's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 36th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 100% of Melrose Park's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 8,003 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Melrose Park ranks
Compare Melrose Park's two percentiles: 83rd within Illinois, only 33rd nationally — a gap of 50 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Melrose Park ranks 21,265 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,113 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 244 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Melrose Park's moderate rating (33rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Melrose Park
Even with 100% of Melrose Park 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Melrose Park's 21,265-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Melrose Park, see the exposure-zones guide.