Yale, IA
How exposed is Yale to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Yale lands at the 10th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 196 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Yale's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 7th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 71.9% of Yale's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 28.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Yale compares
There's little gap between Yale's 10th national percentile and its 19th percentile inside Iowa, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Yale ranks 28,490 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24,996 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 824 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Yale
Yale's low rating (10th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Yale's 71.9% 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 Yale's 28,490-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Yale, see the exposure-zones guide.