Risk management experts, fire chiefs join battle on catastrophic fires

By Doug Bailey

If Frank Frievalt was a guest on the old “What’s My Line” game show, it’s likely the panelists would guess he’s a property and casualty insurance executive. Frievalt can expound knowledgeably and passionately about such things as property loss calculations, disaster risk assessments, actuarial tables, and wildfire mitigation efficacy.

But while he admittedly sounds like an insurance exec sometimes, he is actually senior policy advisor for the Western Fire Chiefs Association, a non-profit that represents fire-related emergency service organizations throughout the west coast and Western Pacific Islands. He is also fire chief of the Mammoth Lakes, Calif., fire department.

But the fact Frievalt's interests and job frequently align with the insurance industry was made clear this month when the Fire Chiefs Association announced a strategic alliance with Milliman, a global leader in risk management for insurers and others, to “intelligently drive down risk in the Wildland-Urban Interface,” or in layman’s terms, prevent catastrophic wildfires from destroying properties. Combining of the two disciplines should not be considered unusual, Frievalt says.

“The fire services and the insurance industry have a very, very long history,” he said. “The first fire suppression resource in the US were insurance companies that provided that on a contract basis to property owners.

Frievalt said there was a realization years ago that the way the fire service and insurance industries were evaluating wildfire risk were different and were confusing property owners.

“Sometimes we're giving different advice, sometimes we're giving conflicting advice,” he said. “Occasionally, we're on the same page. So in the simplest terms, the way that we are setting out to intelligently drive down the risk of property loss is to have the best fire science drive the best modeling science and have that drive the best actuarial science. That will give us a return to higher confidence in the average annual loss calculations that drive rate settings.”

“The fire services and the insurance industry have a very, very long history.” Frank Frievalt, senior policy adviso, Western Fire Chiefs Association

The combined expertise of the two organizations, the companies said, will help mitigation efforts evolve from analysis to intelligent management and purposeful disruption of the fire pathways that enable disastrous conflagration in wildland-urban communities.

“Our communities are facing, and will continue to face for decades to come, extraordinary wildfire threats from a perfect storm of ecologic, economic, and climatologic forces,” the Fire Chiefs association said in a statement announcing the strategic partnership. “We cannot ‘suppress our way out of these conditions. We must instead induce persistent resilience in our communities through the adoption and maintenance of evidence-based mitigations at scale. The shared interest between the fire and insurance professions of zero property loss to property owners from the peril of wildfire is powerful. It is our intent to bookend support for effective mitigations between us and minimize the barriers to implementation by property owners through public and private means.”

Although based in California, the site of many well-publicized forest fires, Frievalt reminds that disastrous wildfires are not relegated to the western states.

“As weather changes, the potential for wildfire exist most everywhere,” he said. “A few years ago, Tennessee had a catastrophic wildland urban interface property loss event. Peshitco, Wisconsin, was the site of the most devastating forest fire in American history. Remember the great Chicago fire? There’s been some in Florida and in areas of New Jersey from time to time. There’s many places across the US that can potentially see those.”

Alliance yields results

The alliance is already yielding results, Frievalt said, as the two organizations are not strangers to each other. The Casualty Actuarial Society recently released a paper in which Milliman worked with a local fire chief district that was one of the first to look at how specific mitigation steps could be used as variables in computer assisted design modeling. The Association and Milliman principal and consulting actuary Nancy Watkins’s also recently did a joint presentation at the annual property loss conference in San Francisco.

“At the end of the day actuaries and fire chiefs are trying to solve the same problem – to understand wildfire risk and figure out the best ways to reduce it,” Watkins said. “With this alliance, we’re combining the WFCA’s on-the-ground leadership with Milliman’s deep insurance and modeling expertise to create an innovative and holistic approach to measuring, communicating, and reducing wildfire risk.”

Doug Bailey is a journalist and freelance writer who lives outside of Boston. He can be reached at [email protected].