See Through The Smoke: Introducing Wildfire Insights by ICEYE for Advanced Monitoring & Damage Assessment

Even though the 55,571 wildfires in the U.S. in 2023 reported by the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) and the 2.6 million acres burned represented some of the lowest annual totals in recent years, the human toll and economic costs that resulted were still significant. For instance, the Maui wildfire which devastated the town of Lahaina resulted in 100 fatalities, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.

As the risk and insurance industry looks for better ways to assess wildfire damage and threats, advances in satellite-based technology are helping to make accurate damage and spread information available on a near-real-time basis. In a recent webinar hosted by Deepak Badoni, president, EigenRisk, Kurt Jackson, global head of Sales at ICEYE, discussed state-of-the-art capabilities now being used by increasing numbers of insurance company claims executives, risk managers, emergency responders and government agencies such as FEMA.

Jackson explained that ICEYE currently has the largest constellation of satellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR), which is capable of “seeing” through smoke, ash and cloud cover any time of day or night. ICEYE’s satellites can cover anywhere in the world every three hours. Thus, whenever a wildfire occurs, ICEYE can generate accurate building-level damage information within hours of the event.

Prior to ICEYE, insurers typically relied on news report, models, wildfire perimeters and/or aerial/optical imagery. Unfortunately, each of these methods has specific restrictions or limitations. News reports are often incomplete and anecdotal; models don’t provide actual wildfire event observation data; perimeters lack precision regarding what building locations have sustained damage, and while aerial/optical imagery might be useful for post-event assessments, it isn’t able to provide loss information while the fire is still raging.

Jackson explained that many insurers currently using data from ICEYE want to get damage and loss information as quickly as possible – even before FNOL – so they can fulfill the promise of the insurance policy and provide a suitable amount of temporary housing units.

Accessible on the EigenRisk platform, ICEYE can provide the desired level of precision in assessing wildfire damage of individual properties within hours rather than days or weeks.

Badoni showed how risk and insurance executives can overlay their property portfolios against wildfire spread to obtain accurate assessments of damage and loss.

Jackson said users will be able to access building-level information with financially quantified data to get accurate and timely assessments of overall loss. He added that ICEYE’s data can discern whether a commercial property sustained a complete loss, giving insurance company claims executives the ability to determine the number and types of adjusters to deploy and where to deploy them in the most efficient manner. This helps accelerate the speed of the insurer’s response and manage the cost of the event to the insured business.

As a wildfire continues burning, risk and insurance executives on the EigenRisk platform will receive 24-hour updates on properties affected and anticipated fire spread. Based on data from Calfire, Jackson said that 98 percent of the buildings damaged by wildfire are completely burned, noting that firefighters typically can’t reach individual buildings during a large-scale wildfire event.

Importantly, the information from ICEYE accessible on the EigenRisk platform can help insurers estimate the scope of their wildfire-related loss and the specific financial impact for making timely and effective reserving decisions.

At present, ICEYE’s building damage detector and wildfire monitoring resources are available for locations throughout the U.S., Canada and Australia. The company is currently expanding these capabilities to include Europe and Japan.

Want to learn more?

To access the webinar, click here. To arrange a discussion and a demonstration of ICEYE’s wildfire damage assessment and monitoring resources accessible on the EigenRisk platform, please contact us: