Insight: Aerial Insights
Images captured from above offer a better view of properties and losses.
Long ago, when the Montgolfier brothers conducted the first manned flight of an untethered hot air balloon, the world discovered something--things tend to look different from 3,000 feet. Altitude brings a more comprehensive view. That bold experiment took off in 1783, and the world's perspective has continued to change in powerful ways.
Consider the images recorded during the 2017 hurricane season, particularly Harvey's damage in Texas, Maria's ravages across Puerto Rico and Irma's sweep through Florida. Those images dominated the news cycles, and some of the most revealing shots were taken from above. From California's rampant wildfires to Houston's flooded neighborhoods, aerial images captured by drones and other aircraft told the story of some of the year's most significant catastrophes with horrifying completeness.
Disasters have an unexpected way of sparking innovation as humanity deploys new ideas to rebound. In places such as Naples, Florida, and Rockport, Texas, images of the wreckage were set side by side with aerial images of the region taken before the hurricanes. Residents, business owners, insurers, and emergency planners were able to compare what remained with what had been in place for a before-and-after review. Such information can prove invaluable in handling claims following large and open-ended catastrophic events. We know that property damages from Hurricane Harvey alone have been on the order of $65 billion to $75 billion.
Aerial tech also holds great potential for underwriting. From it, we can draw data that supports location-based, property-specific information about what's actually unfolding on the ground. Remote sensing technology positioned in the sky can help its users capture property characteristics, detect changes, assess liability risks, estimate damages and assess trends over time. These systems also can yield critical information about the effects of weather, traffic and other factors.
In reviewing potential advantages for businesses, the main sources for high-resolution property images are mobile devices, drones, airplanes and satellites. Microsatellites as small as a football have the capability to capture images of a single structure several times each day. Taken together, these sources can yield highly accurate and dependable data about a given location when coordinated.
A key value of the technology is that it requires little human assistance to capture data from the image. This data can then be fed into information dashboards to help create analytics for a variety of uses--a true diagnostic approach to sharing information. And because there isn't enough resolution to read a license plate or identify a person's face on the ground, aerial imagery typically can't be used to compromise an individual's privacy.
In real time, imagery collected can help document the areas affected, provide operational efficiencies, and accelerate the damage estimation and restoration process for homes and commercial buildings, helping insurers protect people and property. Two centuries ago, who could foresee that a pioneering balloon flight over Paris would bring a revolution in perspective, and a trove of modern-day data that can bring actionable insights?
(Best's Review columnist Scott G. Stephenson is chief executive officer of Verisk. He can be reached at insight@bestreview.com.)
