West Chicago, IL
West Chicago, IL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores West Chicago at the 32nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 7,704 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 West Chicago at the 31st percentile, close to its 32nd-percentile risk score.
West Chicago's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 3.6% of West Chicago's 7,704 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 7,704 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How West Chicago compares
Compare West Chicago's two percentiles: 82nd within Illinois, only 32nd nationally — a gap of 50 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, West Chicago ranks 21,548 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,212 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 264 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in West Chicago
West Chicago's moderate wildfire rating (32nd percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Hardening a home in West Chicago
With 96.4% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, West Chicago 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 West Chicago's 21,548-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond West Chicago, see the exposure-zones guide.