Josh Gibbons

A new Verisk study shows how fire station type fares in predicting fire loss, alone and in combination with ISO’s Public Protection Classification (PPC).

It’s important for insurers to understand advances in fire science and how they assess a community’s adaptation to evolving challenges in fire protection.

Insurers measuring the level of protection in a community need to know which station responds first to every address, who and what are inside those stations, where the firefighters get their water, and a host of other data points.

Fire protection in the United States didn’t grow up overnight. It arose and evolved piece by piece, and to this day, fire protection is changing in large and small ways. Any measure of its effectiveness requires trust from the fire service that the evaluators are fair and knowledgeable—and trust takes time to build.

Plotting the distance to the nearest fire station seems like the obvious path for an insurer to take when measuring fire protection.