Building resilience is vital to confront the ‘new normal’ of California wildfires

Wildfires contributed to a 46% increase in fire severity for U.S. carriers in 2018 and making it critical for them to factor an extended fire season into their predictive models. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Recent years have seen consecutive devastating wildfire seasons in the U.S. and around the world.

In California, the 2017 wildfire season became the worst on record, only for 2018 to prove even more deadly and destructive. In 2017, fires destroyed more than 10,800 structures in California – more than the previous nine years combined. Worse, 2018 experienced a total of 8,054 fires burned over 1.8 million acres, the largest area of burned acreage recorded in a fire season, and over 17,800 structures were lost.