A 5.8 magnitude earthquake occurred in Virginia, a rare occurrence for the east coast.
Following events such as earthquakes, property insurers rush to assess potential damage. Within moments of an event, SpatialKey’s Earthquake Impact app – part of our new Natural Perils suite – allows insurers to see potential impact of an earthquake on their portfolio.
This quake’s epicenter was about 40 miles northwest of Richmond. As you can see, only 3 properties in our sample portfolio fell within areas of an MMI shake intensity of 5 or higher, with a total insured value under $300k.
SpatialKey automatically obtains event data from USGS Earthquake Hazard Program’s ShakeCast system, and identifies which properties were exposed to which shake intensities. All if this is done without any IT intervention on the insurers part, meaning that users throughout the company can gain access to this information instantly, without bottlenecks or hassle.
The Earthquake Impact App, and the Natural Perils Suite it is a part of, are in beta with select customers. If you’re interested, please contact us for more information.
We’re always working on research and development efforts to extend SpatialKey’s reach and capability. One thing we’ve been working on is a tablet application for the BlackBerry Playbook. The Playbook is a new tablet that Research in Motion recently introduced to compete with Apple’s iPad. It’s a slick device, and when paired with a BlackBerry phone it’s a natural fit into the enterprise market.
The application we’ve developed is used to assess the impact of recent earthquakes on an insurance company’s insured locations. When an earthquake hits, it’s critical to quickly undertand how many of your properties were in harm’s way and where you have possible damage. The USGS publishes detailed shake maps for all major earthquakes around the world. These shake maps give details about the magnitude of the ground shaking around the epicenter.
SpatialKey automatically pulls in the latest data from the USGS, so the instant an earthquake occurs you’re only moments away from seeing the impact that the event has on your properties. Just load up SpatialKey on the Playbook, select the new earthquake, and we’ll take care of the rest. SpatialKey calculates which of your properties fall within which levels of shaking, and you can quickly filter down your data to find the properties in the most affected areas.
And given the Playbook’s mobile nature, if you’re on the road assessing insurance claims you can quickly pull up the data nearby to find all the affected properties in the local vicinity. SpatialKey puts an unmatched level of location intelligence in your hands when you’re on the ground.
You can see the application in action in the video below:
SpatialKey on tablet devices is currently an experimental feature that we’re piloting with select customers. If you’re interested, please contact us for more information.
Last Friday, an EF-4 tornado, the second-highest on the Enhanced Fujita scale, ripped through the St Lois Area. The twister caused significant damage to Lambert Airport and hundreds of homes. Miraculously, nobody was killed. According to the NOAA severe weather database, there have been 730 tornadoes of EF-4 or EF-5 scale between 1950 and 2010 causing 3,791 fatalities.
We took a look at this NOAA data in SpatialKey. Here’s a timelapse of EF-4 and EF-5 events over 60 years.
Insurers and risk managers can use this rich dataset to better understand exposure and risk of their policies. Please contact us if you’d like to have this dataset added to your SpatialKey subscription, or learn more about our insurance solution.
NOAA Event Reports for tornado, wind, and hail for April 16.
A recent storm system passing through North Carolina included 62 tornadoes, one of them passing through downtown Raleigh. As weather events like these occur, insurers gear up to assess damage and plan event response. This includes proactively coordinating claims response as well as exploring financial impacts.
Increasingly, third party data – much of it in the public domain – has the potential to help organizations understand these events more quickly and completely. However, integrating these external feeds with internal data – like insured locations – has been a challenge for insurers. SpatialKey addresses this challenge, enabling insurers to quickly see, explore, and analyze event data in context with insured locations – and to distribute that insight throughout the organization.
Tornado Event Reports near Insured Locations in Raleigh, NC: Within minutes of an event, insurers can see NOAA/NWS Event Reports in context with their insured locations.
NOAA’s National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center provides near real-time Storm Reports for tornado, hail, and wind reported by NWS offices. These reports are brief messages that include a time, a relatively precise location, and a brief comment. There were hundreds of Tornado Event Reports on April 16, with comments such as “Over 30 homes destroyed along with a Lowes” and “27 buildings … destroyed on Union Ridge Road…”
SpatialKey can automatically consume and present these NOAA Event Reports in near real time. SpatialKey users can see these events on an interactive map that also contains other locations of interest, like insured locations. They can quickly report on locations in proximity to events, and filter to see only specific events or locations.
Check out this short clip to see more about how this works:
In addition to these preliminary Event Reports, NOAA provides a wealth of data related to damaging weather – some of it going back decades – which can be leveraged to drive better decisions, from underwriting and rating to claims fraud detection. SpatialKey aids by making this data easier to visualize, analyze, and integrate with existing business data.
To learn more about how SpatialKey can provide more horsepower to your event analysis, reporting and damage assessment procedures, contact us today.
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