Wildfire Risk

A single fire can mean millions in losses, therefore insurance underwriters must make sure that policy premiums and guidelines accurately reflect potential risk.

Proxix’s Wildfire Risk provides accurate and comprehensive risk information for calculating brushfire susceptibility.

The Wildfire Risk Database includes the following layers.

Brushfire

Based on Proxix Solutions extensive brushfire modeling expertise and the “best practices” approaches of the major government and laboratories involved with brushfire research, Brushfire Fuel Rank is proprietary risk rating model that accurately determines the actual brushfire risk for extremely small geographic units.

FIREbreak+

FIREbreak+ is the first comprehensive tool for accurately assessing the brushfire risk along the wildland-urban interface. FIREbreak+ identifies the proximity of high risk vegetation and density of structures to help insurers make informed risk determinations.

Available for AK (populated areas only), AZ, CA, CO, FL, ID, MT, NV, NM, OR, UT, WA and WY.

Currently, insurance companies using First American Proxix Solutions' Wildfire Risk scores for underwriting use some combination and weighting of the following variables to rate an individual property's exposure to wildfire:

Fire risk score of the insured address;
Distance in feet to the nearest high or very high risk zone for properties located in low or moderate risk zones;
FIREbreak+ category of the insured address; and
Distance in feet to the wildland

Single Risk Score

To simplify the assessment of wildfire risk and enable end users to quickly and accurately determine the brushfire risk for a defined area or specific location, we have developed a scoring model that rates every property on a 0-100 scale (0 = Very low risk and 100 = Extreme risk).

Based on our statistical analysis of thousands of wildfire home losses, the four (non-building construction) wildfire loss contributors (risk zone, distance to nearest high and very high risk, FIREbreak+ density category, and distance to the WUI) are weighted to generate a single risk score.

The risk scale allows end users to create a proprietary set of conditional rules that enable them to more accurately define locations that they can:

Write policies without extensive onsite investigations;
Carefully consider policies in areas in which the brushfire is disproportionately high due to location characteristics; and
Flag locations for onsite inspection due to potential risk that has been significantly increased by surrounding (off-property brushfire risk factors.

Learn more about our insurance solution, CATUM and other databases: