January 10, 2023 (Wilsonville, OR) - Consistent with its mission to lead, educate, support, and protect, the Western Fire Chiefs Association (WFCA) has established a strategic alliance with Milliman, a global leader in risk management, to intelligently drive down risk in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI). Milliman has an established expertise in WUI risk analysis through extensive work for its property insurance clients.
Our organizations have the confidence, experience, and humility to recognize the complexity and consequential magnitude of the WUI problem, one requiring the recruitment of expertise outside of ourselves.
WFCA Executive Director Jeff Johnson - “Milliman is a preeminent worldwide leader in the insurance and risk space. We can only rely on best of class collaborators like Milliman, who offer actuarial projections into the future, to help engineer our way out of the current wildfire property loss trajectory. We have established this strategic alliance after several years of tightly focused tactical collaboration with Milliman that has consistently yielded high quality and implementable results within the property insurance space.”
Nancy Watkins, a principal and consulting actuary with Milliman - “At the end of the day, actuaries and fire chiefs are trying to solve the same problem – to understand wildfire risk and figure out the best ways to reduce it. With this alliance, we’re combining WFCA’s on-the-ground leadership with Milliman’s deep insurance and modeling expertise to create an innovative and holistic approach to measuring, communicating, and reducing wildfire risk.”
Our WUI communities are facing, and will continue to face for decades to come, extraordinary wildfire threats from a perfect storm of ecologic, economic, and climatologic forces. We cannot “suppress” our way out of these conditions. We must instead induce persistent resilience in our WUI communities through the adoption and maintenance of evidence-based mitigations at scale. The shared interest between the fire and insurance professions of zero property loss to property owners from the peril of wildfire is powerful. It is our intent to bookend support for effective mitigations between us and minimize the barriers to implementation by property owners through public and private means.
Bringing our combined expertise to bear, WFCA and Milliman will help mitigation efforts evolve from analysis to intelligent management and purposeful disruption of the fire pathways that enable disastrous conflagration in WUI communities.
About WFCA
The Western Fire Chiefs Association is a non-profit that represents fire-related emergency service organizations throughout the west coast and Western Pacific Islands. WFCA is dedicated to protecting people and the environment from the occurrence and outcomes of fires and other natural, technological, and human-behavior-caused emergencies. For more information, visit wfca.com.
About Milliman
Milliman is among the world's largest providers of actuarial and related products and services. The firm has consulting practices in healthcare, property & casualty insurance, life insurance and financial services, and employee benefits. Founded in 1947, Milliman is an independent firm with offices in major cities around the globe. For further information, visit milliman.com.
For inquiries about this alliance, please contact us through the following representatives.
WFCA contact: Anne Razo, WFCA, +1 800 785 3473, anne@wfca.com
Milliman contact: Nancy Watkins, Milliman, Inc., +1 415 394 3733, Nancy.Watkins@milliman.com
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