Pontiac, IL
Pontiac wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Pontiac lands at the 6th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 5,175 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Pontiac's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 6th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Pontiac rates 97.7% Minimal exposure against just 2.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 5,175 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 5,175 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Pontiac compares
Pontiac's 32nd-percentile standing inside Illinois outpaces its 6th 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, Pontiac ranks 29,648 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,328 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 989 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Pontiac and the insurance market
Pontiac's low wildfire rating (6th 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 Pontiac
Pontiac's 97.7% 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 Pontiac's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pontiac's 29,648-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Pontiac's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.