Wildfire Risk and Climate Change Update and Forecast for Inland Marine hosted by Inland Marine Underwriters Association. I'm Lillian Colson and I thank you for joining us today. Just a few quick technical tips. You'll find your attendee control panel on your screen and it may minimize by default. At any point you can right click the orange arrow icon, the orange arrow icon to bring it back. Also you can select view on your control panel and uncheck the auto hide option. Here in the control panel is where you'll find our handouts tab with a PDF of today's presentation that you can save to your files to take a look at later. There is also a question box on your control panel. We'll take your questions at the end of the presentation today but you can submit your questions at any time. And to encourage your questions, IMUA will email a $25 Amazon gift card to one of our engaged attendees with a great question. So let's get started. Please be aware of the IMUA statement. I'm honored to introduce today's presenter, Dr. Thomas Duffery. Thank you, Lillian. Welcome. Is it okay if I give a brief background? I'm sorry for the delay. Tom is a senior hazard scientist for CoreLogic Location Science. He's the lead scientist on the development of CoreLogic's deterministic wildfire risk model. Tom works closely with many of the top 100 U.S. insurance companies to help implement CoreLogic's hazard risk models into their automated underwriting and pricing systems. We include a QR code that you'll see on your screen right next to Tom's picture underneath his email address. This QR code has a link that will take you to other articles written by Dr. Duffery. And the articles are on the topic of wildfire risk and mitigation. We are fortunate that Tom has presented numerous times for IMUA, including Wildfire Storm Surge, Flooding, and the Inland Marine Concerns webinar. This is available in our All Access section on the IMUA website, and he has also presented at Marine Insurance Issues Seminar in New York City, always to fantastic feedback. Tom hails from beautiful Wisconsin, where he shared that last week, when they should have had snow on the ground, it was 70 degrees. And I don't think New York City gets quite as cold as Wisconsin, but the unreasonably mild temperatures have been more the norm in New York this winter, too. And while this may be a bit concerning for all of us, it's especially alarming for a senior hazard scientist. On that note, please welcome Dr. Tom Duffery. Thank you, Lillian. I apologize for being a little too eager and jumping in. This is a topic that certainly is a hot button for a lot of people, and it is very important to have this discussion, I think. So today, the focus is really on one hazard specifically, which is the wildfire hazard. And having a discussion that involves the relationship between climate change and wildfire is something that has been ongoing in my field of research for probably 10 to 15 years. And the reason for that is because about two decades ago, we started to notice a change in wildfire activity. And so the question comes up very frequently, is climate change causing this? Is climate change responsible for the wildfire activity we're seeing now? And I think we have to be very conscious of the terminology used. And so you're going to hear me refer to different terms and define them maybe differently than is the norm. But it really is more associated with the scientific definition of things like causation and the relationship between wildfire and climate change. So we can easily look at some types of hazards where there is a direct connection. So if you think of global temperatures rising, which is the most normally or commonly associated trait of climate change, when you think of global temperatures rising, and then you correlate that with glacial ice, Arctic ice, and the melting of that ice resulting in sea levels rising, that's a direct connection. And it's not difficult at all to interpret and understand what that means. Now, if we look at other hazards, hurricanes, tornadoes, hailstorms, and in my field, wildfires, those things, the question is then asked, how do those things relate to climate change? Because there doesn't seem to be as direct a connection. You can't just look at the climate change data, look at those hazards, and understand how they're connected necessarily. So that's what our discussion is going to be about today. And it's going to start out simply enough with, again, some terminology here, the word climate and the word weather. And sometimes those are used interchangeably, and they really should not be. And sometimes the definition of each can be a little bit misinterpreted or misunderstood. I like to think of it like this. Climate is going to dictate kind of the long-term process of how I live, what factors affect where I live. So in very simple terms, if it rains a lot, I'm going to own an umbrella. And climate is going to determine whether or not I own an umbrella, or maybe I own more than one umbrella. If I need to have access to an umbrella, climate is going to tell me, like Seattle, do I get 150 days a year where there's precipitation? Weather, on the other hand, is really simply put, do I want to take the umbrella today? Is there a reason for me in the near term, looking at a 12-hour period, is there a reason for me to be prepared for that? That changes daily. So knowing that there's 150 days of precipitation in Seattle doesn't tell me whether or not I should have an umbrella with me today, but the weather forecast, which is very short-term, does. So now that we have that out of the way, I'm going to confess, I used to be a university professor, and I probably would have never done this to a class that I was teaching because it's awfully early on in the discussion, but we are going to have a poll right out of the gate. And so for the first poll question, and I'll be honest, this is something that I was curious about. I had no idea before I came up with that analogy and decided on this, but how many umbrellas are sold in the U.S. each year? And I'll just put this in context. There are about 340 million people that are living in the U.S. right now, residents of the U.S., citizens. So given that, would you say that there are 7 or 24 or 33 or 46 million umbrellas sold on average each year? Since I don't live in Seattle, even though I don't live in Seattle, I do own a couple umbrellas in Wisconsin. We do have a need for that from time to time, but certainly not as often, not as frequent. And so I think it's important for us to be able to do that. Hi Tom, the results are in. Do you see them? I do, and it looks like we have 40% of the respondents saying that it's 33 million, and it is in fact 33 million. It's about 1 in 10, if you would average it out. We're buying a new umbrella. Now, again, it's interesting to note that when we're talking about climate, climate varies pretty dramatically throughout the country. I mean, we have areas that are very dry. I doubt that you need an umbrella in some parts of Arizona, but other parts of the country do. I'm sure you have a lot of that. So just keeping in mind the differentiation between weather and climate and what we're talking about here is really the climatic change, the effect long term, something that doesn't necessarily vary much from year over year. A couple other terms that I think are important is distinguishing between what I call or what I refer to as a traditional house fire versus wildfire. And again, fire is fire. Both of them will have the same impact on a structure. Both of them can turn a completed structure into ash. But when we talk about house fires, it's all of the other characteristics that are attached to house fires that are kind of the variance, the difference between that and a wildfire. House fires start inside the structure most commonly. So you have a faulty wiring, something else. The house, the ignition will often be inside the structure. It will impact relatively small size, typically the lot or the property that structure's on. The fire intensity. Now again, the fire itself has a constant or stable temperature, but it's the amount of area, amount of fuel that is being consumed at one time that you can actually make a house fire vary between 1,100, 1,500 degrees. Depending on the contents, depending on what the materials are in the building. And then the structures affected in a house fire are typically one and that usually gets a response of maybe one, two, possibly three fire stations, depending on the size, location. You contrast that with a wildfire, all of a sudden you have completely different characteristics. The fire is initiated. By definition, it's a wildfire occurs outside of the home. Approaches the home or more than one home and it's not common to have 100,000 acre sized wildfires, but it's also not uncommon. In other words, There are enough of them that occur regularly during the course of a fire season or a fire year that it's not surprising to see a fire Grow to over 100,000 acres, which means it's huge in scale compared to a house fire. The temperature range again increased typically because you have more fuel burning at the same time. It's not just a structure. It's everything around the structure. In terms of the area affected You think of a house fire again really limited to one or maybe a neighboring structure as well. Whereas here you have the fire approaching in some cases entire neighborhoods entire subdivisions entire communities. So you could easily have hundreds, if not some cases thousands of structures that are at threat for one wildfire event on any given time. And the responses is vastly different, even for a small wildfire. And when I say small. I mean 10 acres 1520 acres. You can have a response that includes air support and in the form of air tankers dropping water or retardant helicopters doing the same Multiple fire stations. Everybody is employed in fighting this fire and ground crews that could number easily into the hundreds of people And when you think about it, how do you fight a wildfire you fight the fire with a house fire, you're actually trying to protect the house. And with a wildfire that is not a luxury that is often afforded because you're trying to stop the fire from getting to the homes. You don't have the luxury of dispatching a team of people at every home in order to prevent that structure from burning In many cases, they try to do that as much as they can. The responders, but it's virtually impossible if the fires of large enough scale. So again, very different types of animals here that we're looking at. And we're really talking about wildfires for this discussion. So here's this is another interesting impact of, you know, trying to define wildfire is what it's affecting and it affects again the fire itself is going to burn the property, the structures, anything that's in its path. But how it affects all of the X area around that so that you can have road closures that affect transportation routes and you can have these closures for Significant amount of time. So the transportation through an area that is is again being affected by wildfire can be pretty dramatic. And secondarily, you have in California primarily is a really good example of policies to de energize power lines so that when you have conditions that are right for a wildfire. Referred to as red flag days where you have high wind speeds high temperatures, combined with low humidity. It just means that everything is really prime That if you have an ignition, it could take off. What they want to do is they don't want that ignition. They try. I shouldn't say that they try to not have that ignition. Because from power lines, the power line infrastructure. And if you have a high wind day and all those other conditions, you can have A failure at a power line, you can have some debris hitting the power line and causing damage all it takes is one spark. And then that power line is the source of the next wildfire and that's not uncommon. It has happened and continues to happen. So if you de energize those lines. It just means everybody in that area is without power, you know, proactively to avoid the wildfire or avoid the fire ignition. The electrical grid and infrastructure in its entirety is affected by a an existing wildfire obviously because it's burning across it can burn across roads. It can burn around water bodies. I mean, it's, it's kind of an on land inland tsunami and that it's going to affect everything in its path as long as there's nothing as long as there's fuel or wind to push it. And then when you think of new construction. By Due to the fact that new construction inherently has to be extending out from old construction. It means that the edges of the cities. What's often referred to as the wild land urban interface where you have the wild land meeting the developed land. Out in those areas is where new construction new residential construction is almost always exclusively going to occur. And so the construction materials and the construction equipment that's out there doing that, you know, building those new homes that in itself is going to be at threat because those are the areas where you again, you're going to see the potential for these fires. I wanted to throw this in here just because you have marine in the in the name of the organization. I start to think about things like that, which I never typically do. I often, you know, I'm really constrained to looking at fires that are burning in California or Washington or obviously now in Texas and looking at all the traditional things that are affected. But when you I started to look at this. I started, I asked myself, are marinas even at threat, not that that's all you deal with. At all, but I'm just curious. I was just curious. And oddly enough, there are a number of marinas that have been affected by recent fires, just going back to 2018. But when you think about it, fires, most often, and we're looking at 80-90% of the time, a fire, a damage that's done from a wildfire is going to be caused by ember ignitions, meaning little pieces of burning material are lifted by the wind, carried a distance and then fall out. And if they fall onto a vulnerable material, doesn't matter if it's a house with some dead leaves around it or dead debris in the gutters, or if it gets into an attic vent, or if it's a boat that's in a harbor, in a marina, and that boat is like a box and that box can contain embers if they fall out in that boat. Or when you think of a marina itself and all the volatile materials where you have paint and you have fiberglass material, all the different chemicals that are easily ignitable, all it takes is some embers falling into the wrong place, and that could start that structure or that boat or any vehicle whatsoever can ignite that. So that's really what we're looking at here is that this is an all-encompassing hazard. It really doesn't pick and choose favorites all that much. It really is anytime you have combustible or vulnerable material and it's in front of a wildfire, it doesn't have to burn through that area, it can actually blow the embers right into it. So getting into a little bit more of the stats related to wildfire activity, these are two graphs that I rely on almost very frequently to explain what the situation is, which is in the US, in the entire 50-state US, looking at the area burned in terms of acres each year, and then the number of fires that occurred during each of those years. So the top graph is area burned. You can see that over time, if we go back to 1990, about 20-25 years ago, started to see a little uptick. And we have this kind of uptrending line over the last 20-24 years, where we see larger amounts of land area that have been consumed in each year. Now it's not uniform. We have high years, we have low years, but overall there's an upward trend. Oddly enough, 2023 is one of the lowest years since 1998. But before that, for the last 15 years prior to that, we've had record-setting years of 10 million or just over 10 million acres several times. And then if you look at the bottom graph, we have the number of fires. And oddly enough, the amount of area burned is not positively correlated with the number of fires. We're seeing a trend, a slight downward trend in the number of US fires every year. And even last year, we saw very few acres, but the number of fires was relatively low, but it wasn't all that low. It wasn't correlated directly to the fire size. So this is kind of the first key consideration when talking about climate and climatic effects on wildfire, is that we see more area burning, but we see fewer fires contributing to it, which means that the fires themselves are larger. And that is one of the key components when we talk about climate change and wildfire. Now, I know we're hitting the polls real fast and furious here, but we do have another one here. Talking about fire size, that's one part of it. Talking about fire ignitions is another part. What I'm asking here, and obviously this is the worst part of it, is which state do you think hosted the deadliest wildfire in US history, caused the most human fatalities? And I have them geographically dispersed, and all of these actually has an interesting wildfire story, but there's only one of them that can lay claim to the unfortunate circumstance of having the deadliest fire that caused the most fatalities. Interesting, votes are coming in. All right. Well, obviously, California and Hawaii are always in the news about wildfire. Wisconsin, not very much. Even though I live here, I'm more aware of it, but we don't have anywhere near the type of fires today that other states have. And Hawaii had the most votes with 58%, and I can understand why, because that was an incredibly deadly fire and one of the deadliest in U.S. history, far and away. I mean, we've had bad fires in California that have come not altogether that close, but close enough that, again, they've been terrible fires as well. Maine had a huge fire back in the early 1800s, but there wasn't a large loss of life, but it was a huge multi-million acre fire. But I have to confess that this is kind of a trick question, because being from Wisconsin, I know a little bit more about the fire history. There's a community called Peshtigo, which is a northeast part of Wisconsin, not too far from the Green Bay area. And in 1871, a fire burned through Peshtigo, and it was a raging inferno, and it was because of all the logging that had occurred, and there was a drought, and it killed somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 people. It completely devastated the entire community, and there are numerous horror stories that go along with that. It never got a lot of attention, and the reason it never got a lot of attention is because it occurred on the exact same day as the Great Chicago Fire, and the Great Chicago Fire did not have the loss of life, but it had the property loss that far surpassed a small community in Wisconsin. So it's just one of those history oddball stories where, you know, we don't really hear about this or know about it, but it wasn't a major urban area. And certainly what happened in Lahaina this past year, again, devastated that entire community, and it's unfortunate. It's fortunate it didn't do worse, but it was bad enough. But when you think about somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 people succumbing to a fire, those days are hopefully long gone. We don't have to worry about that, but at the same time, 1871, older history. Hawaii is probably the current, you know, if you're interested in the current, high value would be Hawaii. Okay, enough of that. Some other records that we want to associate kind of with wildfires here, just to give you a feel for what we're talking about when we're saying that we noticed a change a couple decades ago. Again, I'm not going to go through all these states individually, but you can see that it's dispersed around the west, the western U.S., so you have multiple states having the largest or a number of the largest fires that have occurred. Now, some of these also have the most damaging or destructive fires associated with them as well. I didn't put all of that on here, but at the same time for California I did, but for the other ones I did not. But just know that, you know, large doesn't always mean overly destructive. You can have a large fire in a very remote area in northern California, in Nevada, and it won't affect a lot of communities or a lot of population, but other times you can have a large fire that completely has huge numbers of property loss associated with it. You can also have small fires with huge numbers if it occurs in the wrong place. The thing that I really want you to take away from this is this is all in the last, well, since 2000. All my numbers are since 2002. We have had the best, most well-funded, best-trained, best-prepared, most efficient, most effective wildfire suppression efforts in history occurring in the last two decades. We've had more money thrown at it. We've had more and we've had more equipment thrown at it, more people thrown at it, and yet we still see these records being set. And again, I was assured by Eileen and Lillian that they had nothing to do with the fires in Texas, even though that would have given a bump to this webinar and made us, you know, tip top of mind for discussion. They assured me they had nothing to do with setting those fires. I trust them. I believe them. But at the same time, we don't have to look back farther than a week or yesterday to see another record-setting fire event and a million-acre fire at that. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that shortly here. So the other part of the discussion is we're talking about climate change. Climate change is not limited to the United States. It's a global issue and we don't necessarily have as much external information that comes across our desks every day, every week, every month. But just rest assured we're not the only ones experiencing these devastating events. Greece, Chile, European nations, South American nations, some Asian countries all have wildfires and have wildfire activity ramp up in the last decade or two. Don't have to go back more than 2023 and we'll talk about Canada, 45 million acres burned in Canada, which is huge, just amazingly large amount of area that I have transposed onto the map with New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. The red outline would be the equivalent of 45 million acres. So you can see obviously Canada was dispersed over the entire country. But if you concentrated it, it would be an incredibly huge amount of area in the U.S. The blue box is an indicator of the highest acreage year that we've ever had in the U.S. Again, compacted into one polygon. So you can see what happened in Canada last year was so far out of scope with what happened, the worst that's happened in the U.S. So you're starting to think about this. I'm telling you that these fires are expanding. They're burning more area with fewer fires, fewer events occurring. And the overall size is incredibly, the totals are incredibly large and they're getting larger. So now that kind of sets the stage for when we start talking about, oh, another poll. That sets the stage for what we're going to be talking about from here on out. So our third poll, if there were 45 million acres that burned in Canada last year, what is an average year? So if we go look back over the last couple of decades, what would be an average year for Canada in terms of millions of acres? 1.9, 6.8, 12.5 or 18.1? Votes are coming in. Well, that's very impressive. We have 54% of the responders selecting 6.8, and that is exactly what it is, 6.8 million approximately on average every year. So again, I think Canada was certainly something that we had to pay attention to last year. And I think it's interesting to contrast that with the fact that the United States only had 2.3 million acres that burned last year. Canada had 45 million. We had almost a record-setting low value, and they had certainly an incredibly high record-setting value. So that is another factor related to the selectivity of climate change, because certain areas are experiencing things that other areas are not, even though they're not that distant. So we're getting to kind of the meat of the story here, which is climate change as a cause for wildfire. And if that question is posed simply as it is at the top of this slide, I would have to say no. There really isn't any other way to say that climate change is not causing. When we think of causing, is it creating? It's not creating the wildfire. If we were looking at things like climate change related to higher temperatures, more severe storms, long droughts, severe droughts, none of those things are the cause. Now, that doesn't mean they're not related, they're just not the cause. We do know the cause of wildfires, and it's hard to get away from the cause of wildfires. We're surrounded by the cause of wildfires every day. It's people. People are the ones that cause almost all wildfires. 80% to 90% of wildfires are human caused, completely without question human caused. Lightning is probably the most prevalent type of natural cause, and that is not... Some places are more susceptible to it, other places never have a lightning condition ever. So when we're talking about the cause, it's people who are careless, the lit cigarette out the car window, arsonists who are just crazy, unlucky people. There are a number of those out there where you're just going about your daily activities and you do something that creates a spark that in the past or under normal conditions wouldn't be a problem, now it is because that spark turns into the next big fire. And then unfortunately, we have a large group in the last category, the knucklehead group. There are people that do things for no discernibly logical reason, and I can't even get into it. I've read dozens, literally dozens of stories of media articles I've read about how wildfires started. It was entirely due to somebody who just did not think through the process of what they were doing. And it may have been something very benign, but they didn't think through it or they did it the wrong place at the wrong time. Campfires are one of those things that if you do it right and you're conscientious about it, it's never a problem. You do it wrong, wrong time, wrong place, or inattentiveness, whatever, then you get the knucklehead label at that point. So the question then needs to be rephrased. Is climate change influencing wildfires? Very careful with the terminology and the answer is yes. That is the conclusion of that answer is uniform and accepted within the wildfire science community. So if we go and now start talking about that influence, that's really going to be the focus of where we're going with this discussion. Probably in your junior high science class, you may have seen something about a fire triangle. So if you have oxygen, you have heat or a source of ignition, and you have a fuel, carbon-based fuel, you will almost without question be able to have a fire of some sort. So all kinds of material can burn. And these are the three things that you need to make that happen. That's really not what we're talking about with influencing. With influencing, we're really talking about what's called the fire behavior triangle. And this is specifically designed for wildfire. You see that we have a couple new categories. We have topography. So we have the terrain. Is it hilly terrain? Is it steep terrain? Is there mountainous terrain? Is it flat terrain? Well, climate change doesn't affect any of that. So that is kind of in the background. That's not something that we're concerned with related to climate change. However, you drop down to the second new category of weather. Weather is entirely related to climate change. So when the climate changes, the temperature changes. The relative humidity can change. Precipitation can change in amount and frequency and duration. Wind can change. So all of a sudden, we're starting to talk about the things that actually can cause wildfires to expand, cause wildfires to burn more with more intensity. And now we have to pay attention to those things. The last category here is fuel, which again, was similar to the first triangle. But now we're talking about what's listed here. Fuel availability. In other words, is there a lot of fuel there? When you think about a grassy field, there's grass. When you think about a pine forest, now you're looking at a tremendously large amount of fuel mass. So the availability of the fuel, the continuity, is it real sparse and scattered or is it huge uniform area? The size, the dryness, the temperature, the condition. These are all things now that we can relate to different aspects of climate change based on some of the factors that we're going to talk about here next. So this is under a new heading. When I was in grad school, we didn't talk about, there was no attribution science. We really didn't talk about it because it didn't exist. It was only in the last decade or so that this has come to the forefront. So now we're not talking about what's causing it. We're talking about what is affecting it, what is enhancing it. So if you come up with a scientific hypothesis, if climate change causes wildfires, as is stated sometimes, then the number of fires should be increasing. Well, it's just the opposite. We're seeing fewer wildfires. They're larger. They're more intense. We're just not seeing more of them. So it can't be that climate change is causing the wildfires. So is climate change hypothesis, is climate change then causing or enhancing fire size and intensity to be affected? And if so, what factors would be influencing that? So we have that as our working hypothesis. What factors are influencing those conditions are on the left. We have warmer air temperature. We have lower humidity. We have droughts that are not only more severe, but they're more prolonged. You'll hear in the literature, you'll see a lot of reference to mega droughts. So we have two decades of drought conditions, not every single day. There can be precipitation, but it's never enough to change those drought conditions long-term. We have seasonal aspects to consider. We have spring coming earlier in the year. We have fall occurring or starting later in the year. And what that means is that the things that typically reverse or inhibit wildfire activity, kind of a wet spring or early precipitation coming in the fall or snowpack or winter precipitation, if that is limited to a lesser time of year, that means that summer drying period where you typically have more fuel becoming readily available is longer. And then the final bullet here is fewer precipitation events, but more severe. We're actually seeing evidence, especially when you hear things like such and such a place just had their three months' worth of rainfall in one event in two days. They had a month's worth or three months' worth or six months' worth. They're getting the same amount of precipitation that they would normally get over the year. It's only coming in one or two or three different times instead of spread out over four months. It's coming on three different weeks. What that means is that in between, there isn't enough of an even pattern of moisture, of air moisture, soil moisture. So things are getting wetter more and faster, and then they're getting drier faster as well. The right-hand column, the effect on wildfires is really just kind of a shopping list of what it's doing. In other words, this, we're looking at things where there's more fuel and that fuel is in a condition that allows it to ignite more easily and burn more readily. So you have more of what's creating the size of the fire, and it's in a condition that allows the intensity of that fire to increase as well. So you have drier, warmer fuel. You have soil and air moisture that starts to deplete. You have vegetation that can't take that changing climatic pattern. So you have plants that die off more readily, and when they die off, they create better fuel because dead vegetation is better fuel than living vegetation. The fourth bullet is insect overwinter survival. I have a photo of some, a portion of a conifer forest. I think this was in Colorado, and you can see that about every other tree is dead or dying visibly. That doesn't mean the others aren't affected, it's just that I'm not showing it yet. This is due to bark beetles that burrow under the bark and they girdle the tree, the woody part of the tree, and over a period of years, several years, a year or two, they will kill that tree. It is no longer able to move the liquid inside the tree up and down to allow that tree to be healthy and to photosynthesize. If you have bark beetle, we've always had bark beetles for decades, eons. If those bark beetles are allowed to survive because winters don't get as cold, that means there are more of them and they are able to do more damage. Vegetation can be stressed without being killed, so you have some partial damage to certain types of plants, and that means it's drier and it's more readily available to burn. All of these factors that are the effects on wildfire are really conditioning vegetation to be more burnable, whether it's dead or dying or stressed, and also to accumulate more mass, so you actually have a bigger pile of fuel to begin with. We are to our last poll of the day. I told you about bark beetles and they are devastating. Within the last 25 years, what percent of pine trees in the western U.S. have been killed by bark beetle infestation? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Very good. Well, again, thank you for participating in these polls, my little attempts at reliving my university days. The high score was 46% for the last bullet, 5% of Western US conifer forests have been impacted, and that is correct. It amounts to, I think, I did a rough calculation, about 60 million acres so far, and if any of you have traveled in the West, Colorado, doesn't matter, just about any place where there's pine forest, you might have noticed this. It might not be as obvious as that air photo was, but if you notice that there are a lot of dead trees, a lot of brown conifer trees, interspersed with some living ones, or sometimes there are entire patches and swaths that are affected, it's almost guaranteed that it's due to this. It's the number one problem out there in terms of insect infestation. So, talking about these changing conditions, all the things that are going to create more fuel and fuel that's more volatile, more easily burned, what are some things that I'm using to support this? We didn't have a million acre fire in the last 100 years until 2020, and then we had a million acre fire in California, August Complex. Prior to that, 1910 was the last million acre fire. I want to caveat by saying in the lower 48, Alaska has had a million acre fire, but in the lower 48 had not had one since 1910. Then we had one in 2020. Then we started to see in the last, not last year, but the year before, started to see areas that have not burned in a long, long time with the intensity necessary to kill sequoia trees primarily, which are trees that can grow, again, thousands of years old. They have seen a lot of wildfire activity in that time, but if it's all been subdued because of the lack of fuels and the intensity of the fires, we don't see those trees, a high mortality rate on those trees. They have bark that's a foot thick, so it really takes an intense fire to kill a tree that large, that old. We've seen that lately. I added this bullet in this morning. This is the second million acre fire now that we've seen in the lower 48 in the last 120, 110 years, and that's the Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas. Then all the record-setting fires, again, I didn't have time to list or space to list them all, but virtually every western state from the Plains West has got some kind of a record that they can look at or point to and say, in the last 20 years, this has changed. So looking at climate change, I guess the question, how is this relevant? Well, just kind of to give a synopsis of this, any factor that creates more ignitions, more fuel, or drier fuel, that's a critical factor, and that's what climate change is doing. It's not creating more ignitions, but it's creating better conditions. So we know even if the number of ignitions continues to decline, the number of fires continues to decline, all of the other characteristics are still in place that we see that are contributing to this. You've got more fuel. Drought conditions are really instrumental in creating more fuel, but insects and disease also play a role. We have the existing vegetation or fuel easier to ignite. It's warmer, it's drier, lower humidity, and then you have a situation that I didn't talk about too much, but you have a situation where you can have other vegetation species coming in after a fire because the original vegetation isn't able to regrow. Those changing climatic conditions mean that maybe that pine forest that just burned down isn't able to return to a pine forest because you're getting more invasives that are coming into that area in the aftermath, and they're more able to survive even though they may dry out and refuel themselves. So a forecast, I don't know that I'm qualified to give much of a forecast. I will give my opinion, I think, from my scientific opinion based on the work I've done and what I've seen. All of the conditions that contribute to this whole piece of the pie we call climate change, especially with the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, they have not been reduced enough to make a difference. So that's one reason why I think there doesn't seem to be any reason to forecast something different because the underlying cause is still there. The patterns with temperature, precip, and drought, they're not going to change until the underlying cause is addressed. So all of those changing factors where we see higher temperatures, we see again more severe precipitation, but fewer events, we see longer term drought, no reason for that to change unless the underlying changes. Vegetation is the key to wildfire. Without the fuel, you have no wildfire. The problem is, and I don't know, I phrase it as a problem, but the situation is that the vegetation burns. We do have a return with some precipitation, just enough to make more vegetation grow, which means it's going to dry out eventually and burn again. So all of the precipitation that California got this year, and they got a ton of it, record-setting precipitation basically over the last two years, pulled California out of drought conditions, but at the same time it just means all of that precipitation, all that snow melt that's going to be coming in the next couple months, is making those plants grow more than they ever have in the last 20 years. So we're going to have a return to that. That doesn't mean it's a problem initially, it just means that long term, the fuel is coming back. We haven't eliminated the problem, and we're not going to eliminate wildfire. It's going to continue with or without climate change. So my final thought, I don't know if I have too many solutions, but there are things that can be done to help. So we're not going to prevent wildfires, not going to happen. Even if we get rid of all the knuckleheads, we'll still have lightning, so it's going to happen in some places at some times. But we can start to think about how do we prevent property loss, and that means that we have to remediate and mitigate at the individual level. So your individual house, your individual property, you can do things for that, or an individual business, you can do things for that to reduce the opportunity to fire, to find a vulnerable part of your structure. Controlled burns are great. It's just so incredibly difficult to do on a large scale, because you can't just light a match and let it burn. You have to control the temperature and the intensity of that fire, and that takes a lot of human action to help that process along in the right way. There have been controlled burns in the past that have gotten out of hand and turned into huge wildfires, and nobody wants that. Building in areas that you can mitigate. If you build in an area where you just can't do anything to remove the threat somewhat, you're asking for that threat to expose itself, and that's just guaranteed it's going to happen at some point. Taking into account all mitigation in wildfire areas, yes. Everything that you possibly can do to your property, and your structure, and hopefully your community. Because community level efforts are really impactful. They mean that it's not just one house out of the neighborhood, it's every house is doing something. And then I guess the bottom line is awareness and education. Knowing what to be aware of, knowing what to look for, knowing what to be concerned about, and then trying to remove that process or help that process along. So with that said, I hope I didn't run too long here. Maybe a minute or two after. Happy to take any and all questions. Thank you so much, Tom. And as Tom said, now we'll open up for Q&A. And to ask a question, go to your control panel and type in your question in the question box, and then submit it, and we'll see your question. And we have our first question from Gina. Are you noticing wildfires being caused by solar panels? Oh, caused by solar panels. I have not. It's an interesting question. I have not heard about that. I'm trying to think if there's anything related. No, I'm sorry. If that is something that is in the news or has been reported, I have not heard about that. I apologize. And some others in the question box put in, great question, Gina. So I think that's something that we'll be looking for in the future to see if that does take place. Absolutely. And since you've brought it to my attention, I absolutely am going to go out and take a look at the literature and see what's out there, because it's intriguing to think that that could somehow be related. We have a question from Pam. As an inland marine underwriter, I write a lot of builder's risk. Any guidance on what to look for in terms of factors when new construction is in a high wildfire area? Yeah. Anything that can – Yeah, these are really – go ahead. It's an excellent question. Excellent. So far, they both are. The first one stumped me, but this one I have a little more knowledge of, I think. When you're looking at having those building – the construction going on, and so you have all the equipment, you have the machinery, all of the effort that is undergoing, it's all – a lot of that is a mechanical process. And so, if you're in a high-risk area, so you know that there's been some – typically, they have to go in first, clear out the vegetation, maybe put down some roads or add some paved roads, but they're trying to clear out the vegetation for the lots. Unfortunately, they're often unable to clear out the vegetation around the development. So, if you have 100 homes going in a subdivision, they'll clear out for those 100 home sites, and everything outside of that will remain potentially – if it was high-risk, remain high-risk. So, when you look at your building site, it doesn't have the fuel that you would associate with a wildfire, but it could be 100 feet away. It could be 500 feet away. It could be 1,000 feet away. Right at the edge of that development, that high-risk fuel still exists, and that still presents an issue because any of the processes that go into the construction of the structure, whether it be a saw or a drill or any type of equipment that can create a spark, that – if that spark is allowed – if it ever is able to go into the area where you have the fuel, that can start a fire. I mean, there are stories about people swinging a golf club at a golf course in the rough – not on the fairway – in the rough, and just hitting a little piece of gravel or a rock, and it created a spark from the golf club – face of the metal golf club – and that spark started a fire. And so, when you think about it, if that can happen, then any type of – you know, other type of equipment, obviously, can create it too. So, I think what you look for is not just whether the parcel or the lot is cleared, but you also want to know, if there is high risk in that area, how far am I away from that? Where do I have to kind of keep a vigil of what I should be conscious of in terms of where my machinery is? And again, I'll just throw out one more anecdotal thing, which is anything that runs on an internal combustion engine has a muffler, and that muffler gets hot. And there are many instances of people pulling off the road with an automobile in California or any of the western states, and they get into some area where there's just enough grass under that car to come in contact with the muffler or the catalytic converter, and that starts that grass on fire. So, it would be the same for construction equipment as well. Thank you. A question from Melody. Do you think other parts of the country will see some of these big wildfires? So, for example, the Midwest, the South, East Coast, even? Yeah, that is top of mind for us, because right now, CoreLogic, the company I work for, we are laser focused on the western US. We also have data that we've developed for Florida, because Florida has in the past had a number of wildfire events. But we have this gap of area where in the past, historically, I can point to a lot of statistics that say I don't, there's no reason to care about Illinois. There's no reason to, I shouldn't say that, there's no reason to put a lot of investment into a wildfire database for Illinois, for Ohio, for Missouri. But what we're seeing now is that, again, partially based on climate change, not entirely, but partially, we're seeing the encroachment of wildfire into the eastern US more than in the past. Texas, we've always known Texas as a wildfire, potential wildfire state. And we've had Texas for a number of years. I've been there quite a few times. But this last year, for the first time on my radar, Louisiana popped up. And Louisiana had some very, very bad wildfire activity this last year, 2023. And we know that Tennessee, Gatlinburg, they've had some wildfire activity. The Carolinas have had wildfire activity. So there are pockets of it in the east. As far as the future, I would, again, I don't want to be chicken little. I don't want to say the sky is falling. But at the same time, I'm very concerned about the eastern US and the migration of wildfire to some of the areas that we always consider to be lush and green and humid. If they have the right conditions, even for six months out of the year where it gets dry, there can be wildfire activity that is enough to be destructive. So definitely the eastern U.S. is a concern. Thank you. Next we have a question from Ryan. Approximately how far can embers travel? Is it all dependent on the wind conditions? It is. Primarily dependent on wind conditions. It's also dependent on the material that's burning. If you think of grass, it's really light and wispy and so wind can easily pick up little embers off of grass. With a 5-10 mile an hour wind, you can have ember movement from grass. One saving grace with grass is that it is a light, small ember and it self-extinguishes very quickly. So it's not going to blow. If it blows 100 yards, it's probably going to be ash. It's not going to be an ember anymore. When you think of the larger pieces of material that would come off of some brush or shrubs, so you have the woody vegetation but it's really small, that can hold heat a much longer time and it's still relatively light. So those can travel further and still be a viable ignition source. When you think of something like a 50 mile an hour wind in a pine forest, you can break off larger pieces of branches and pine cones and other things that are more heft, more mass to them. Those can travel quite a distance in a 50, 60, 70 mile an hour wind. We've seen there are reports, I should say. It's very difficult to do this under any type of scientific experiment when you're looking at long distances. But there are reports of embers, viable ignition embers, things that are still burning when they land, of traveling one to two miles. So that I would say is, I'm very confident that that is reliable information. I've heard anecdotal information of beyond two miles. I think then it really has to be incredibly specific conditions and criteria for that to happen. That's such a long distance to travel. But anyway, I would say you're looking at probably a good reasonable max between one and two miles. And definitely not uncommon for a thousand feet, half mile, there's no question that viable embers travel that far routinely. Sort of related to the solar question, Robert wanted to know if you have heard any evidence of wind turbines causing any increased wildfire exposure? This is one that I, again, I remember seeing a couple minor articles. They weren't in any type of research journals that I'm aware of. But I think that they were giving kind of an anecdotal evidence for wind turbines because they have the rotating pieces and they have the mechanical infrastructure that there could be a potential if there was some type of a faulty generator or whatever the internal components are, if that was faulty that it could overheat and potentially have some, it's almost like a power line in that you have anything that can generate a spark if it falls onto the right material that is dry and vulnerable, then it can generate wildfire. So again, I've run into that not very frequently, but I have heard some evidence of the potential for that. But again, that would be something, it depends on the location of that. If you have it in an area where you have a lot of dry grass, I would say that would probably be something that would be more of a concern. I know in Wisconsin, we have wind turbines, they're often in agricultural fields. I think if you had that same setup into a cornfield or a hayfield or something like that, where you have cropping, probably not as much of an issue. Typically, cropland is more either irrigated or has more moisture than dry grasses do. So this question is from Sherry, and she said, if you're using schools to research the hazard grade for wildfire on a risk, what do you consider sufficient distance to a high wildfire area? For instance, if your risk is in a low burnable area and you research and the nearest high area is 15 miles away, is that adequate distance to consider you being truly in a low zone area? Yeah, what we've found, and again, we've had the opportunity by virtue of the fact that I've done this, I've been working with this stuff for over 20 years, that we do have a lot of historical fires that we can draw upon and see how those fires are going to be affected. And I think fires that we can draw upon and see how those fires traveled, who was threatened by those fires and so forth. The one thing that you'll notice is when they order evacuations, they're doing so because they want people to get out of the way of the fire with ample time to do so. So your evacuation areas aren't necessarily going to reflect the true threatened area. And nobody knows where the fire is necessarily going to end up based on how it goes. So I get that. When we're looking at the aftermath of the fire, I would say that within five miles of a fire, you don't really have much to be concerned about. The embers aren't typically going to affect that area and certainly the fire itself, the heat, the radiant energy is not. But in terms of the high risk area, that's not always where the fire is limited to. So to say that if you're five miles away from high risk, well, I guess that would still be, that would still, I can still defend that. But at the same time, you probably could be closer than five miles to high risk because that doesn't mean, just because it's high risk doesn't mean it's always going to burn. There are other conditions that come into play. But again, I think knowing where the high risk is in relation to where you are, if you're looking at construction, chances are good that you're going to be more concerned about the vegetation that's within a half mile of you. So if you have a high risk within a half mile where you're doing construction, I would say that it would be time to look into making sure that the crews that are working are aware of that and are cognizant of the fact that you just have to try to avoid any way that you are going to spread any type of ember or flame to that nearby area that's within a half mile. Beyond a half mile, I don't know that construction equipment would have much impact. But it's the homeowner that would come in and live in that structure that would be concerned about the half mile because they're not necessarily creating the fire. Somebody, again, one of our favorite terms, the knuckleheads, could have created the fire. And if it gets within a half mile of your home, that's when you start, you have to start to pay attention to the mitigation that's been done to prevent embers from being a problem. I hope I answered your question. I don't know. I kind of went around on that one a little bit. And Sherry, if there was any additional, if there are any additional thoughts that you have, you can type them in in the chat. So, I'm sorry, the question box. So, this one is from Brady. Canada has had a relatively dry winter. Do you expect to see another larger than average wildfire year north of the border? It's an excellent question also. Again, I wish I had a better crystal ball. But given the information that I know, I would not be surprised. I would be very surprised if they had it blow up like they did this past year. But I would not be surprised if they had more acreage than their average, you know, somewhere in the 7 to 10 million acre range. I would not be surprised if they had that. And part of the reason is the conditions are still viable. The things that caused that fire to expand with the fuels are still in place. They did have a lot of lightning sourced ignitions. So, that's hard to call. It's hard to say whether or not that that will happen again. I don't know that we can predict that. But they also have some fires that are still burning. So, they have some, you know, they're certainly controlled to a certain degree. But at the same time, they have things that are still burning from last year. So, I would say, yeah, I'm very concerned. I'm concerned that Canada and the U.S. might have, again, makes me sound like a doomsday person. But I'm concerned that the North American continent might have a bad wildfire year. For the U.S., I only say that because if you remember that graph of fire acreage burned, it did go up and it did dip down. And you can have back-to-back years where one year is 10 million and one year is 4 million. Next year is 10 million. There certainly wasn't a continuity that you would have a string of half a dozen years of low or half a dozen years of high. So, anytime we have a low year, I'm concerned about the next year or the year after that. Thank you. This next question is from Truxton. Can you share your thoughts on potential for mitigation in the future by artificial weather, such as like cloud seeding, man-made rain, etc.? Well, that's really an interesting topic. I'm no expert in that, but throughout my career, because that has been raised for a number of different purposes as an option, historically, in the U.S. And so, when you talk about cloud seeding, it's really to get rid of the drought conditions. What can we do to return the farmland to a viable growing medium? I don't know that I've heard it very often used in terms of wildfire events, but the other part of the problem, the one thing I remember about whatever information that I collected over the years was that somebody wants it to be different, somebody wants it to be the same. And so, how do you regulate when you're starting to mess with, toy with the atmosphere, how do you get it to do what you want it to do exactly where you want it to do it, I think was the big question. And so, if you're creating more precipitation in one area to either cut down on wildfires or encourage cropland growth or something like that, is it going to turn around and dump too much precipitation in another area where somebody loses their home to a flood? And I think there's a certain amount of liability concerns about that. It was always an interesting thing because it would be one thing to be able to control, I shouldn't say control, influence the weather, but to be able to do it precisely in a geographic way, precise geographic way is the difficulty, I think. Thank you. This question is from Sarah. What are your thoughts on systems installed in homes to mitigate potential wildfire damage? So, you're probably referring to like sprinkler systems, things like that. That's... Here's my take on sprinklers. Sprinklers are good for fires that start inside the house. So, you have a lot of office buildings and so forth, all have to have sprinkler systems. Homes can have sprinkler systems. And if you have an ignition that starts in the electrical wiring, there's a sensor and it identifies that heat source, then you have sprinklers go off. Good for that. If you have a wildfire concern, that means the fire, again, is going to be coming from the outside of your house and start the ignition on the outside. You can have sprinkler systems that are set up to work outside the house and not just a lawn sprinkler, but actually spigots on or associated with the outside of the house. So, you can have sprinkler systems that have the spigots on or associated with the exterior of your home that will go off. And certainly those are good. They can be... I shouldn't say they're good. They can be effective. The concern is you have to have a power supply because you need a pump in order to pump that water. And then you have to have a water supply that would be viable as well. Because the one thing that I mentioned earlier that is a concern is when you don't have electricity. And that was that's something that has led to some disastrous consequences in the past. The Oakland Hills fire in 1991 in the Bay Area, California, one of the problems with that was that the electrical grid went down and they couldn't get the water to pump through the pump stations to use the firefighting equipment. Well, the same thing would happen at home is if you didn't have electricity, you wouldn't be able to use those sprinklers. But again, for interior, I think it's certainly, we know that it has a huge impact. Exterior, I think the jury is still a little bit out. I think it can be good if you have a backup water and electrical supply to ensure that you are able to maintain the pumps. That would be the thing. Thank you. So from Paul, Paul's looking for any links that you might have to research potential wild that you use to research potential wildfires. He actually posted a link in the chat, in the question box. I can send it to you afterwards to see if it's something that you use or if you have any other links that you use or can refer all to. I would be happy to. Absolutely. I'll take a look at the link that you sent, but the link that you sent, but yeah, I'm sure I have a, obviously, you run across a lot of different sources out there and some are marginal, some are questionable and the vast majority of them are very, very good sources of information. Be happy to share that. So, this question, it's really geared more for underwriters in the audience, and I think in order to be able to answer this, people would need to type their answers in the question box, but Catherine is wondering, are insurance carriers aggregating wildfire or excluding wildfire permissible by law? I'm not entirely sure. You know, I'll answer this, and Catherine, I apologize if it's not even close to what you were trying to get across, but again, I'm kind of the wildfire scientist, and we have other people in my team that are more the insurance experts, but I've absorbed a little bit, but clearly, in the last year to two years, California kind of reset the entire insurance, wildfire insurance industry, and I don't know, they reset it on its ear, I guess you could say. California started to mandate that, under certain conditions, like for setting pricing for a policy, that the insurance company had to account for one or more of 12 different types of mitigation on a property, so that the pricing could be adjusted if the property owner was doing mitigation. As a data provider, we were responsible for collecting and creating that database, and then passing it along to the insurance company, who could set the prices however they wanted to. This put a burden on the insurer, and there are other regulations that California has included with that, and along with that, and some other ones separate from that, and as you may be aware, there are a number of insurance companies who either pulled out of California, or decided not to write any new business in California for homeowners, and I think there was a company that I heard about just this last week, who's pulled out of not just California, but other states as well. It really created an incredibly unstable, in my opinion, unstable market, because the insurers don't really know what to do to be able to accommodate and account for all this without a huge burden on them. From a science perspective, I'll say that I think it's a good thing to want to know about the mitigation, and to try to encourage people to do mitigation, because there are some properties where that's the only thing that you're going to do to help you alleviate the problem, but at the same time, I don't know enough about the business, the actual underwriting business, and pricing business, to probably be able to answer the question the way it should be answered, so I apologize for that. Thanks, Tom. Our last question, can you talk a little bit about CoreLogic's wildfire scores, and how often they're updated? And then they also said, this is from Matt, being eucalyptus grows primarily in California, which are oily plants, highly flammable. Are these studies to mitigate the cause to wildfires? Are there studies to mitigate the cause to wildfires? Yeah, eucalyptus is not what you want to see when you look out your window, for the reasons you said. You know, eucalyptus was brought, sent from Australia to California. One of the reasons when it was introduced is that it was going to be used as a fuel, the oil was going to be used as a fuel, so that should tell you all you need to know about whether or not these trees are potentially volatile. In terms of CoreLogic and updating our data, we do have, it's one of those things where you have a couple different aspects of the environment that are changing on a daily basis, and one of those is new construction. You have construction go in, you have an area cleared out, you have new homes or businesses built, that changes the environment, it changes the wildfire risk in that area. If the fuel is gone, it means it's lower, but if you put in houses that are closer to the remaining fuel, those are going to be higher. The other thing that changes in addition to that is that you have a situation where you have other, the vegetation itself can change over time, either, again, going through drought conditions, it can become more volatile, more vulnerable as well, but after a fire, you have no risk until you have the regrowth, and then you have more fuel coming in, so you have that. We're constantly monitoring that and updating our data to reflect those kind of changes. What you don't see, typically, is large-scale permanent changes. In other words, we're not removing forest and making it into a parking lot for thousands of acres, so we don't have to deal with that, but we do have to deal with the constant evolving change of development and the natural change occurred with vegetation, and bark beetles are certainly one of those things that can cause change. As far as our updates go, we do two updates for our primary wildfire score product per year, six months apart, and then we also have what we call our wildfire mitigation score, which is similar but uses the mitigation, incorporates the mitigation factors, and I think that is updated four times a year, simply because when we're looking at that, we're actually trying to collect data on what people are doing to help protect their properties, which is 12 factors that the California Department of Insurance mandated. We want to be able to update that more frequently because those things can happen, they can change more rapidly. We want to make sure that people are provided with, if they're getting a credit for it, they should get the credit as soon as possible after it's completed, so hopefully, I don't know if that answered your question completely, but hopefully that would, and again, if you ever want to get in touch about any of these things, my takeaway on this is, I think Gina asked the solar question, I'm going to respond to that because that's, I'm really curious myself now, but if any of you have any questions, you saw my email, don't hesitate to get in touch with me. Be happy to have correspondence about anything discussed or anything else that you would want to discuss. Thank you so much, Tom. This was simply splendid, and we really appreciate you sharing your expertise and your knowledge with IMUA's membership, and as you can see by all the questions that were asked, it's a really relevant topic and timely topic for IMUA. We just posted a survey link in the chat for attendees. Please take a moment to complete the survey and provide your feedback to IMUA. So, Tom, are you ready to announce our attendee winner? Well, I think, you know, when you're, the game should be called Stump the Chump, and I muddled my way through answers to just about every question except the first one, so I want to give Gina props for coming up with a question that I just was not in any way, shape, or form prepared to respond to, and I couldn't even make up anything. I couldn't lie if I tried because I was drawing a complete blank, so I would have to say every question was great. Let me preface it by saying that everybody had, and that has been my experience with every one of these that I've done with IMUA, is that the questions are phenomenal, the interaction is incredible. I guess I was able to keep everybody awake and nobody fell asleep because unfortunately that happens far too often, but I thought it was great, great questions, but I'm going to give the nod to Gina on her solar panel question. I couldn't agree with you more, Tom, and we are so happy to have you with us today. It's always a pleasure to have you as a presenter, and congratulations to Gina on winning the Amazon gift card, and thank you so much for your participation. IMUA will send an email to you, and so be on the lookout for that, Gina. Thanks to all of our attendees for your participation and questions, and we hope to see you soon. Have a great rest of the day. This ends today's webinar.

climate change

wildfire risk

human activities

Dr. Tom Duffery

temperature

humidity

fuel availability

fire size

fire intensity

wildfire behavior

western United States

Canada