Houston’s flooded streets are being filmed from above – by drones piloted by insurance agents.
Hurricane Harvey flooded the Texas city with 19 trillion – trillion, with a T – tons of water. That’s the largest rainfall event in the history of the continental United States. The flooding has left many homes too unsafe for insurance agents to inspect themselves, and rendered others completely inaccessible to humans.
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So insurance agents are solving the problem by using drones to inspect the damage remotely, according to a report by
Mashable.
Travelers Insurance sent 65 drone-pilot agents to Houston and the company’s vice president of claims told the
Associated Press that Travelers plans to train 600 agents to fly the remote aircraft by early 2018.
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The drones allow insurers to speed up the claims process without having to wait weeks for clean-up crews to make areas accessible to foot traffic.
“If you had a good line of sight, for example, but you were stopped by nature or law enforcement from entering an area, you could put a drone in the area and get access to that property,” Jim Whittle, chief claims counsel for the American Insurance Association, told the AP. “That could demonstrate immediately that that was a property that had considerable wind damage, let’s say, and allow the insurer to cut a check.”
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