River Forest, IN
River Forest wildfire risk explained
USFS scores River Forest at the 8th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 10 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks River Forest at the 9th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where River Forest's buildings actually sit
Direct exposure dominates in River Forest: 80% of its 10 buildings, versus 0% Indirect and 20% Minimal. Clearing space around a structure changes the outcome here more than any single building-material swap. This is a small settlement by building count — 10 total — so these shares describe a handful of structures, not a statistical average across thousands.
River Forest against the rest of the country
Compare River Forest's two percentiles: 51st within Indiana, only 8th nationally — a gap of 42 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, River Forest ranks 28,866 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 31,509 by building count (1 is largest). Within Indiana alone, it ranks 478 of 967 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Indiana on its state page.
River Forest and the insurance market
River Forest's low rating (8th 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
River Forest's 80% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind River Forest's 28,866-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. At 10 buildings, River Forest is close to the size where USFS's data gets thin — the data-quality guide explains why 517 places nationally get no score at all.