Union, IA
Union wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Union at the 60th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 307 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Union at the 62nd national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Union's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 83.4% of Union's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 16.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Union compares
Union's 84th-percentile standing inside Iowa outpaces its 60th 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, Union ranks 12,506 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,442 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 169 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Union and the insurance market
Union's 60th-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Union's 83.4% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 307 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Union. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Union, see the exposure-zones guide.