Old Ripley, IL
How exposed is Old Ripley to wildfire?
USFS scores Old Ripley at the 15th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 85 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Old Ripley at the 16th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Old Ripley's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 56.5% of Old Ripley's 85 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 17.7% Direct and 25.9% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Old Ripley compares
Compare Old Ripley's two percentiles: 54th within Illinois, only 15th nationally — a gap of 38 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Old Ripley ranks 26,653 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 29,684 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 668 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Old Ripley and the insurance market
Old Ripley's low wildfire rating (15th 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 Old Ripley
Because 56.5% of Old Ripley'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.
Where Old Ripley's figures come from
Old Ripley's 15th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Old Ripley's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.