Rolling Meadows, IL
How exposed is Rolling Meadows to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Rolling Meadows at the 27th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 7,798 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Rolling Meadows's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 27th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 2.8% of Rolling Meadows's 7,798 buildings carry Direct exposure and 8.8% carry Indirect; the remaining 88.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 7,798 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Rolling Meadows ranks
Compare Rolling Meadows's two percentiles: 75th within Illinois, only 27th nationally — a gap of 48 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rolling Meadows ranks 23,122 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,181 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 367 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Rolling Meadows and the insurance market
Rolling Meadows's moderate rating (27th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 88.4% of Rolling Meadows outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
Where Rolling Meadows's figures come from
Rolling Meadows's 27th-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 Rolling Meadows's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.