PAGE 3 PROTECTING YOUR PROPERTY ® 888.321.5200 | ai-mbc.com Sheila E. Salvatore, Editor | Editor@AdjustersInternational.com Copyright © 2020 Adjusters International, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. E13-1022 Insights for Your Industry® is published as a public service by Adjusters International, Ltd. It is provided for general information and is not intended to replace professional insurance, legal and/or financial advice for specific cases. Regarding residential property, Kunreuther writes that “since the risk of a homeowner depends in part on the mitigation actions of everyone in the area, insurers cannot typically offer property-level mitigation discounts on pricing. “If an entire community invested in wildfire mitigation, however, that could be an input to lower insurance premiums.” Insurance Options Even in the absence of collective community efforts, fire risk mitigation efforts by individual property owners can pay off for them. Zesty.ai, an analytics firm, recently released an application that supplements location information with data from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety related to human-controlled factors. These include the amount of defensible space at a location, landscape designs that impede the spread of fire, the use of fire-resistant materials, and the installation of vents to repel airborne embers. Zesty claims that “homes in a level 10 (unprotected) fire risk area may rank at level 1 (highly protected) for survivability.”9 That’s quite a claim, but some property owners in areas affected by wildfire are upgrading their fire protection on their own. In a revival of a practice of the early fire insurance companies, modern property insurers serving commercial accounts and high net worth households are providing private proprietary fire protection services along with property coverage.10 The use of private companies to combat wildfires has grown steadily since the USFS and other public agencies first began contracting with them in the late 1990s, according to the National Wildfire Suppression Association (NWSA), a trade association for private firefighting companies. The NWSA estimates that its member companies account for roughly 40% of wildfire fighting capacity in the country, and nearly two-thirds of capacity in certain areas.11 Consuming Their Fuel There’s something else about wildfires that should allow property owners to have confidence in their ability to address the risk: Wildfires consume their own fuel. Therefore, wildfires are — or should be — highly unlikely to happen in the same location any time soon, unless occupants and public agencies neglect to manage the terrain after a fire. Wildfire: A Fearsome but Manageable Peril Continued
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