The U.S. National Flood Insurance Program isn’t the only game in town
Whenever the subject of overland flood insurance for Canadian homeowners comes up, someone invariably will warn against it by bringing up the spectre of the U.S. National Flood Insurance Program. This...
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Western’s Storm Damage Assessment team on the ground in tornado struck...
At this is being written, Western’s University’s Storm Damage Assessment Team is on the ground in Angus, Ontario working with Environment Canada (EC) to rate a tornado that ripped through town at about...
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First person: The August 4 Burlington storm
It was raining in Oakville, but it was nothing worth writing home about, just a normal run-of-the-mill summer storm. But as soon as I crossed the boundary into Burlington, that changed. I was quite...
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Factoring groundwater into flood risk
While groundwater figures prominently in riverine and urban flooding and is relatively easy to map, insurers, urban planners, governments and other key stakeholders seldom factor it in when considering...
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The state of flood mapping in Canada
On October 10, ICLR held a Friday Forum workshop entitled ‘National Riverine Floodplain Mapping Framework and Advancements in Urban Overland Flood Risk Assessment’, which largely looked at the state...
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Bracing for an earthquake
The California Earthquake Authority (CEA) and the State of California have teamed up to create a pilot program to provide homeowners in parts of the state with a financial incentive to brace and bolt...
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ICLR investigates resilience of some homes in Fort McMurray
ICLR has been successful in gaining official authorization to allow a noted wildfire researcher behind police cordons to investigate the resilience to wildfire of certain homes in Fort McMurray,...
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Industry impacts of the Fort McMurray wildfire
Unlike the 2013 flood in southern Alberta, the Fort McMurray wildfire is a heavily insured event. Considering that property insurance got its roots in fire (indeed it used to be widely known as ‘fire...
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Putting Fort Mac back better
A small city that wasn’t designed to burn was put up in the middle of the Boreal forest that was designed to burn. Are we simply going to put Fort McMurray back the way it was? Fortunately for insureds...
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Big data? How about starting with just ‘data’?
We live in an age of ‘Big Data’. And while it seems to me that the actual term is being used less and less these days (indicating, perhaps, that the concept has become mainstreamed), the overall notion...
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