Pleasant Hill, IA
Pleasant Hill, IA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Pleasant Hill at the 51st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 4,024 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Pleasant Hill at the 53rd national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Pleasant Hill's buildings actually sit
Only 23.5% of Pleasant Hill's 4,024 buildings carry Direct exposure and 2.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 73.6% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Pleasant Hill against the rest of the country
Compare Pleasant Hill's two percentiles: 70th within Iowa, only 51st nationally — a gap of 19 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pleasant Hill ranks 15,467 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,224 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 307 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Pleasant Hill and the insurance market
Pleasant Hill's elevated wildfire rating (51st 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Pleasant Hill's 73.6% 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.
Where Pleasant Hill's figures come from
Pleasant Hill's 51st-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 Pleasant Hill's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.