Waterloo, IL
Waterloo, IL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Waterloo lands at the 13th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 4,790 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Waterloo at the 13th percentile, close to its 13th-percentile risk score.
Waterloo's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Waterloo's buildings (80.4% of 4,790) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure.
Waterloo against the rest of the country
Compare Waterloo's two percentiles: 49th within Illinois, only 13th nationally — a gap of 36 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Waterloo ranks 27,413 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,561 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 741 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
Waterloo's low rating (13th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Waterloo
With 80.4% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Waterloo gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Waterloo's 27,413-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Waterloo, see the exposure-zones guide.