Skokie, IL
How exposed is Skokie to wildfire?
USFS scores Skokie at the 25th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 22,203 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Skokie at the 29th percentile, close to its 25th-percentile risk score.
Skokie's building exposure, zone by zone
Skokie rates 99.9% Minimal exposure against just 0.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 22,203 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 22,203 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Skokie ranks
Within Illinois, Skokie ranks higher (70th percentile) than it does nationally (25th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Skokie ranks 23,787 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 612 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 428 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 25th national percentile, Skokie rates moderate for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 99.9% of Skokie 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.
More on how this number was built
Skokie's 25th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Skokie, see the exposure-zones guide.