73ofit insured.A yearbefore,in2017,the
TubbsFireandotherwinecountrycom-
plexblazeshadincineratedmorethan
6,000structures,resultingin 22 deaths
andmorethan$12billionininsurance
claims. Combined, the twoseasons
wipedoutmorethanaquarter-century
ofunderwritingprofitsfortheCalifornia
insurancemarket,accordingtoMilliman
Inc.,a riskassessmentcompanythat
workswithinsurers.(Consumeradvo-
catespointoutthattheindustryhas
madesomeofthismoneybackthanks
toa courtsettlementwithPG&Eandthe
$1.3billion in increased revenue from
hiking up premiums.)
“The Camp Fire was a real pivot
point,” says Roy Wright, president andchief executive officer of the Insurance
Institute for Business & Home Safety,
an industry research and data organi-
zation. He compares it to Hurricane
Andrew, the Category 5 hurricane that
laid waste to South Florida in 1992. That
“taught us that we had to do a better
job of gauging the future risk of mon-
ster storms,” he says.
Wildfire models range in scale from
the global—what regions are most likely
to dry out and become fire-prone in the
coming decades?—to the hyperlocal—
where is this fire that’s already burning
likely to move next? The former were
already numerous by 2018; the latter,
not so much. Most of the models fire
departments used were developed inthe ’80s, if not earlier. Nik Steinberg,
who heads research for the climate
risk assessment company Four Twenty
Seven, a unit of Moody’s Corp., says
fire maps were a low priority until very
recently. “We didn’t have a wildfire
model until recently because nobody
was asking,” he says.
A month after firefighters pro-
nounced the Camp Fire contained, the
California Energy Commission put out
a request for proposals for a new suite
of real-time risk models. The winner
was Pyregence, which developed a tool
thatrunsmillionsofsimulationstotry
toprojecta fire’smostlikelynextmoves
within 900 squaremeters(9,688square
PREVIOUS SPREAD: NASA; SAPSIS: PHOTOGRAPH BY JESSICA CHOU FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK feet) of accuracy.