More than a million properties are at risk of bushfire damage this year as a dry winter has increased the risk,
Aon Benfield has said.
Peter Cheesman, head of analytics, Aon Benfield, told
Insurance Business that more than one million properties face a fire risk this summer with New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT facing the greatest threat.
“It is probably equal to previous bad seasons,” Cheesman said. “You have got to realise that the bushfire threat, unless it is raining, is all through the summer and is always there. As a rule of thumb you could say anything that is within 50 to 100m of significant bush area is essentially a property that might be at risk.”
The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) recently found that winter of 2017 was the 9th driest on record as New South Wales brought forward the start of the bushfire danger season from the beginning of October to the beginning of September. So with risks continuing to rise and with fires having already burned in several states so far this season, Cheesman highlighted that there are tools available for the industry to monitor and measure its bushfire risk.
“I think that locational data will continue to improve,” Cheesman noted. “The things we really want to know about are not just knowing where a risk is but everything about that risk in terms of its construction type, and what other things are conditional to making that risk better or worse across the locations.
“All this technology is not necessarily stopping the bushfires occurring but it means you are in a better positon to manage the situation.”
The BoM and rural fire services across the country are now making more data available to other industries, allowing insurers and brokers to tap into risk data in real-time.
“If a broker on the ground were going out to a new commercial risk client, they can type in the address, which shows them exactly where it is and the other buildings associated with that address,” Cheesman explained. “It would provide all of the peril information in one report so when you go and start talking to the owner of that location you have more information and are not relying on that person providing that information.”
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BoM reveals disaster outlook
Queensland faces ‘severe heatwave’, fire danger
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