Your Wildfire Risk is Like a Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich
Risk analysis, at its core, involves breaking down complex systems into comprehensible layers. Athena Intelligence excels by focusing on one crucial layer — geography — through the lens of geospatial technology and wildfire solutions. Our advanced geospatial, AI-derived synthetic data risk analysis tools provide actionable insights into wildfire risk, enabling utilities, communities and financial organizations to make informed decisions. To illustrate the value of our approach, let’s use an analogy that everyone can understand — peanut butter and jelly (PB&J) sandwich.
At Athena, we often compare the components of wildfire risk, using geospatial technology, to the different components of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. In reality, Athena’s model of wildfire has more than a dozen dimensions, plus complexity related to file types and geospatial coordinates, but for discussion purposes, let’s use a simple 3-dimensional model of bread, peanut butter and jelly.
The peanut butter layer of geospatial data related to wildfires. This is the numerous databases available from government and academic sources on historic fires, vegetation type and insights into the behavior of fire.
This foundational layer is used by all wildfire modelers and provides the critical insights.
The jelly layer is the topographic information which reflects natural fire breaks, topography, solar degree days, evapotranspiration (an agtech term referring to data about soil, water evaporation, and transpiration or evaporation through the stomata in plant leaves). These influence the health of plants and are driven by the local water cycle and climate, which in turn is the fuel for wildfires.
The bread layer is based on human behavior. A large percentage of wildfires are ignited by human activity: campfires not put out correctly, sparks from equipment, arson, barbeques or burns that get out of control.
Athena’s strength is the composability of the data. For insurers, the bread layer includes information from underwriting applications, the property values, prior claims history, and the insured’s reported fire mitigation or home hardening efforts. Or it could be wildfire risk portfolio management, or portfolio management based on geographic diversification rules and reserving requirements.
For utility clients, the bread layer would include equipment types and ageing, risk spend assessments, prior mitigation, burns or hardening, public policy or perceptions of risk, real estate values or other Value at Risk assessments.
As you can see, the PB&J analogy is a gross simplification of the complexity. Together, these layers create a complete solution, delivering actionable insights that support risk assessment, prioritizing projects, decision making and portfolio optimization.
In contrast, other wildfire risk assessment tools describe the proximity to attributes or factors that they believe increases the risk to a structure. They stack (report or describe) attributes without converting the information into probabilities which can be used in quantitative risk management tools. These models cannot convert attributes, such as “distance to a fire station” or “presence of wooden fences” into measurable probabilities. Wildfires, as opposed to single location fires, are driven by real-world impact of factors like flying embers and the inertia of fire spread.
Making a Sandwich (or, Working with Attributes)
Imagine a wildfire risk modeler, with responsibility for lunch for 100 children (none with nut allergies). Our quant-modeler builds a model for the sandwiches the children are likely to want. (Again, a 3-dimensional proxy for the multi-dimension wildfire risk model.)
The resulting order for 100 children, is based on 18 types of PB&Js that could be created with 3 types of bread, 3 types of jelly and chunky or smooth peanut butter.
Two different data vendors (or sandwich shops) offer different responses to the order. Athena’s 100 sandwiches made to order or the other guy, who delivers loaves of bread, jars of jelly and peanut butter. Hopefully, the second solution included a knife to make the 100 sandwiches.
Our utility clients are engineers responsible for equipment, but without the time and energy to evaluate multiple public databases. Athena takes best-in-class data and, like an insect’s compound eye, evaluates the data in light of historic fires in the bioregion. A compound eye integrates many perspectives to create a picture — just as Athena offers clients highly granular insights, with transparency to the original data sources, across vast landscapes. With probabilities based on current conditions that are designed to be used by actuaries, investors, expert witnesses, corporate executives and engineers.
Athena Intelligence delivers a seamless, end-to-end solution that empowers you to effectively assess wildfire risk a full year in advance (regardless of wind, weather or season).
Most utility clients use Athena initially to confirm their Hazardous Fire Areas (HFAs or HRZ), then to prioritize their mitigation efforts to the highest risk areas. As they get more comfortable using the data, they review their operational procedures, their PSPS plans, their Risk Spend Efficiency or other measure of effectiveness of their mitigation actions.
Bottom line: Reach out to us for a demonstration, because when it comes to wildfire risk, you deserve more than just the ingredients. You deserve the complete solution.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Clients include insurance, electric utilities, communities and financial services companies, where Athena’s geospatial intelligence incorporated into wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), property insurance underwriting and portfolio risk optimization.
Reach out to us at Info@Project-Athena.com and follow us on LinkedIn
