RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data Provides Insight Into Recent California Wildfire Activity

Newark, Calif. – August 28, 2006 – Risk Management Solutions (RMS), the world's leading provider of products and services for the management of catastrophe risk, has applied its RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data to analyze recent fires that have burned almost twice as much area as the five-year average for the same time period. The RMS data was released prior to the 2006 California fire season to help the re/insurance industry manage exposure to California wildfire risk.

Two of the largest California fires of this season, the Sawtooth Complex and the Millard Complex fires that spread through San Bernardino County in July, provide a snapshot of the value of the RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data. Together these fires burned 86,000 acres, mainly in areas that the RMS data identified as having moderate, high, and very high hazard values. Furthermore, the majority of 2006 fires in or near wildland zones began in and spread across areas identified as moderate or greater hazard areas.

The model performance reflects its consideration of surface fuel, local weather conditions influencing fuel moisture, and correlation of risk between adjacent cells via potential fire spread. An animation comparing the actual fire spread to the RMS hazard data is available here.

The RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data is a suite of wildfire assessment tools that provide a robust and integrated solution to help agents, brokers, insurers, and reinsurers reliably identify locations exposed to wildfire risk. Its methodology incorporates the latest techniques in wildfire risk assessment using advanced fire behavior calculations to evaluate wildfire hazard, threat, and susceptibility in wildland, rural, and urban areas. The data considers varying weather conditions, annual frequencies of fire occurrence, surface fuel types, canopy cover, and topography, and is also the only data on the market to consider the likelihood of ignition in determining wildfire hazard.

“The RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data provides a robust and integrated solution to assess wildfire risk in California by using analytical fire behavior models in assessing the importance of the many parameters that impact wildfire risk assessment,” said Dr. Auguste Boissonnade, vice president of research at RMS. “Models that do not incorporate all of these parameters encompass only a small portion of the factors that contribute to wildfire hazard.”

The RMS data can be input into an underwriting application or used as part of an internal wildfire lookup system to identify commercial properties or residences that fall within wildfire risk zones defined as very low, low, moderate, high, very high, or extreme. RMS also provides accumulation options to determine a location’s contribution to the overall hazard within an account or portfolio.

The RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data features:

• Hazard retrieval by nine different wildfire attributes, including Wildfire Hazard, Wildfire Susceptibility, Wildfire Threat, Surface Fuels, Special Climatic Conditions, and Accessibility

• Wild Land Urban Interface (WUI) zones defining areas where structures and human development meet or intermingle with undeveloped wildland -- used to identify high risk areas

• A proprietary Variable Resolution Grid (VRG) methodology implemented at various resolutions according to exposure and hazard information

• Historical fire information based on fire reporting data from county, state, and federal agencies

• Historical weather data to define California’s Weather Influence Zones (WIZ), which outline areas with weather conditions likely to impact fire behavior

The RMS® Wildfire Hazard Data is accessible through the RiskLink® and RiskBrowser® catastrophe modeling platforms, and is available in the newest version of the RiskSearch® online property risk service released on August 8, 2006.