Pekin, IL
Pekin wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Pekin at the 16th national percentile for risk to structures, among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a score built from 15,379 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Pekin at the 17th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Pekin's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 69% of Pekin's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3% Direct and 28% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 15,379 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Pekin compares
Within Illinois, Pekin ranks higher (55th percentile) than it does nationally (16th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pekin ranks 26,338 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 960 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 647 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Pekin
At the 16th national percentile, Pekin rates low for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Hardening a home in Pekin
Pekin's 69% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pekin's 26,338-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Pekin, see the exposure-zones guide.