Ongoing wildfires in Florida and Georgia show that major blazes are increasingly threatening property in parts of the U.S. not traditionally seen as high risk, says a prominent disaster modeling company.
Fire crews continue to battle a series of wildfires in rural and exurban areas in southern Georgia and northern Florida. The largest are thought to have ignited in late April.
The fires are of “a much larger scale” than the states have experienced and underscore that “wildfire risk is not confined to the Western U.S,” said an analysis by Firas Saleh, director of North America wildfire models at Moody’s.
The company sells catastrophe models widely used by insurance companies and regulators to simulate how wildfire and other disasters can threaten property. It is separate from the Moody’s division that analyzes credit risk.
