{"id":3044,"date":"2020-04-22T04:22:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-21T21:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esrith.com\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2022-04-07T17:08:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T10:08:49","slug":"the-unseen-after-a-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.esrith.com\/en\/blog-en\/the-unseen-after-a-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unseen: After a Disaster, Imagery Gives Insurance Companies a Clear Picture"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Human ingenuity can be a poor match for nature\u2019s strength. When hurricanes, wildfires, or tornadoes strike, the human instinct is to hunker down or flee. In the aftermath, even our most adaptable tools can fail. All-terrain equipment, amphibious vehicles\u2014these often can\u2019t enter disaster zones when obstacles abound or dangerous conditions persist. That can leave residents, first responders, and government officials struggling to gain a basic awareness of what has happened and what to do next. Such blind spots slow operations at a time when delays can be measured in lives lost.

Eager to overcome those limitations, a consortium of insurance companies is working to change the nature of recovery. They formed the National Insurance Crime Bureau\u2019s\u00a0Geospatial Intelligence Center\u00a0(GIC) on the premise that aircraft can help rapidly identify damage from large-scale weather events that would otherwise take a long time to discover\u2014essentially uncovering the unseen.

If early results are any indication, this new brand of visibility could soon be as routine as a pilot cutting through the eye of a hurricane.

Operational Visibility from the Sky<\/strong>

The work of the GIC is possible through a fleet of small airplanes equipped with high-resolution cameras, as well as on-demand computing power and\u00a0location intelligence\u00a0technology.

The center\u2019s mission is to spot changes on the ground. It sets a baseline by shooting ultra-high-definition aerial photography across the country on an annual schedule. Then,\u00a0when major weather events hit, the pilots take to the air as soon as conditions allow and begin shooting images of the damage.

\u201cOne of the powerful uses of this tool is that with the aerial imagery, we can increase our engagement with our customers before our claim professionals have physically deployed into an impacted area,\u201d says Don Florek, vice president of catastrophe management at Travelers, the sixth-largest insurance company in the United States.

Imagery alone doesn\u2019t give Travelers and its peers a head start on customer care; it yields data but not necessarily context. To see what people on the ground can\u2019t see, Travelers imports the aerial photographs into a\u00a0geographic information system (GIS)\u00a0and melds the raw imagery with road networks, clients\u2019 addresses, and weather data.

Since most weather events cover many square miles, company analysts created an artificial intelligence model that speeds up the identification process. Trained on thousands of images and powered by machine learning, the program quickly flags locations where clients have been affected.

Florek describes the location intelligence that Travelers sees with the resulting GIS-based smart maps. \u201cWe aggregate millions of data points from weather services to create event overlays, allowing us to visualize the data.\u00a0 The sophisticated use of layered geospatial insights enhances our overall operational intelligence,\u201d he explains. That data could include wind speeds, rainfall\u2014even the diameter of hail that fell in a particular location. Operational awareness of this kind gives Travelers and its clients two advantages: vision and speed.

Reaching Out without Prompt<\/strong>

Some Travelers clients initiate claims soon after an adverse event. Others can\u2019t access their neighborhoods to see what has happened to their homes. In those cases, Travelers can now use its view of the unseen to initiate contact. This happened in the days after the Camp Fire decimated Paradise, California, in 2018.

\u201cWe used the aerial imagery and the geospatial applications to assess property damage throughout the evacuated areas, allowing us to identify homes that had been completely destroyed or even partially damaged,\u201d Florek says. The imagery \u201callowed us the information to begin reaching out to those customers to identify if they were safe [and] to begin the claim process and begin to understand how best we could help them. That\u2019s completely different than how we would\u2019ve approached something several years ago, without having that same level of insight,\u201d he notes.

First responders and local officials now enjoy the same increased visibility, since GIC provides imagery to them as well.

\u201cThat bird\u2019s-eye view of the affected area gives first responders important clues to where they should deploy resources at a time when speed is critical,\u201d says Ryan Bank, managing director of the GIC.

Focusing on Customer Satisfaction<\/strong>

For now at least, the twin-engine pilots and their high-resolution cameras haven\u2019t replaced traditional methods of disaster assessment; insurance adjusters still need to inspect damage in person to complete most appraisals. But the imagery, combined with location intelligence and AI, bolsters situational awareness immediately after tumultuous events, when speed of recovery is critical.

It is also proving valuable in other areas of the insurance life cycle. Risk analysts, for instance, have begun using location intelligence from imagery to fine-tune models of risk. With GIS-based analysis, they can more accurately predict threats to specific locations. Fraud examiners are interested in aerial imagery, too, since it creates an additional check on homeowners who falsely claim that\u00a0a weather event damaged their property.

In claims handling, the ability to see what was previously unseen has already helped Travelers increase its customer responsiveness. For example, in 2018, Travelers says it resolved 94 percent of claims within 30 days\u2014during a year crowded with major disasters. That type of efficiency is key in the insurance industry, where the\u00a0second most common client complaint\u00a0is that their payments were delayed.

For Florek and the team at Travelers, having eyes in the sky and location intelligence on the ground has helped turn understanding into action.

\u201cThe layered geospatial insights really provide us with a whole different level of operational insight to understand the event, the impact for our customers, and how best to deploy the right people to the right place as quickly as possible,\u201d Florek says.

<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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