Sycamore, IL
Sycamore wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Sycamore at the 4th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 6,586 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 Sycamore at the 5th percentile, close to its 4th-percentile risk score.
Sycamore's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 3.6% of Sycamore's 6,586 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 96.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 6,586 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sycamore compares
Within Illinois, Sycamore ranks higher (25th percentile) than it does nationally (4th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sycamore ranks 30,155 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,633 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 1,086 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Sycamore
At the 4th national percentile, Sycamore rates low 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
Sycamore's 96.4% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sycamore's 30,155-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sycamore, see the exposure-zones guide.