Merrillville, IN
Merrillville wildfire risk explained
Merrillville's 13,492 buildings earn a 54th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Merrillville at the 56th percentile, close to its 54th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Merrillville rates 52.1% Minimal exposure against just 12% Direct and 35.9% Indirect — of 13,492 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 13,492 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Merrillville ranks
Merrillville's 99th-percentile standing inside Indiana outpaces its 54th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Merrillville ranks 14,557 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,122 by building count (1 is largest). Within Indiana alone, it ranks 15 of 967 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Indiana on its state page.
Merrillville and the insurance market
Merrillville's elevated rating (54th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
With 52.1% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Merrillville 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 Merrillville's 14,557-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Merrillville, see the exposure-zones guide.