Over the past decade, there has been a new paradigm emerging in the American fire service. This paradigm shift is often referred to as Community Risk Reduction, or simply CRR. The genesis of this change comes from the British fire service, where in the early 2000s the central government mandated that local fire services meet challenging fire reduction targets or face substantial budget cuts. These fire reduction targets were initially dismissed as absurd by fire personnel who had seen limited success in their legacy fire prevention efforts and assumed people were going to continue to make bad choices and fires would continue to happen unabated. However, given that they were facing potentially daunting cuts, the fire services across the UK got creative. They figured out what strategies actually worked, and they started seeing substantial reductions in fires countrywide. What they originally dismissed as absurd ended up turning into a nearly 60% reduction in the total number of fires across the country and nearly a 40% reduction in primary dwelling fires[i] over the initial ten-year period. Meanwhile, during that same period, according to the NFPA’s annual fire loss reports, the number of fire incidents in the U.S. remained largely unchanged[ii].

Risk Management Service Inc. (RMS) estimates $25 billion to $35 billion in onshore and offshore insured losses in the Gulf of Mexico alone were caused by Hurricane Ida. This doesn’t include the damage to other parts of the country. While the fundamentals of hurricanes are widely understood these days, there remain several important nuances to hurricane losses that are essential to understand for insurers, regulators, and the general public alike. Here we will look at one less understood type of claim from hurricanes – slab claims.

In August 2020, AAIS introduced its new Risk Awareness Service (RAS), a digital resource center tracking catastrophic risk and providing risk information in real time. At the inaugural AAIS Pulse Newsmagazine, AAIS VP Data and Actuarial Services Phil LeGrone described the Risk Awareness Service, its goals, and the value it can provide insurance carriers and the customers they serve. He also welcomed Jeff Waters, a Senior Product Manager at Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the leading modeling firms, to add his perspective on emerging modeling approaches and tools.

It’s common to hear the phrase, ‘the world is getting more complex every day’…so much that it’s become cliché. That is, unless it’s your job to try to understand, quantify, and insure the perils that come from that complexity. We know you’re looking for actionable insights to protect your business. The problem is typically not the lack of information about these perils but rather, the information overload that makes it a challenge to to find timely, relevant, and reliable insights that you can use to make informed decisions. You rely on AAIS for advisory expertise on the products your customers use, and now we’re inviting you to try our new Risk Awareness Service, our latest tool to help our Members maintain your competitive advantage.