Canada's wildfire risk has spread beyond the provinces the industry has traditionally prepared for, and the claims adjusting infrastructure has not fully caught up, according to Lee Powell (pictured left), vice president of major and complex loss at Sedgwick.
"We're watching out west, but we have wildfires out on the East Coast, in the Atlantic. I've never seen that before, to be honest," he told Insurance Business Canada.
But recent years have shown that Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada are no longer outside the risk zone – and the adjusting workforce needs to be positioned accordingly.
"We expect it'll be out west, but it could be in Ontario," Powell said. "It could be anywhere."
Michael Galea (pictured right), senior vice president of national operations at Sedgwick, said Sedgwick has been preparing for that shift.
"Our focus has been getting adjusters across Canada licensed in all the various provinces," Galea said. "Quebec always being that anomaly where Quebec adjusters are licensed in Quebec."
The licensing system is province-by-province, with different education requirements, different renewal timelines and different costs. Alberta has the highest bar – 15 hours of continuing education annually. June is the renewal period for most provincial licences, which means the administrative work of keeping adjusters deployable peaks at the same time the season is ramping up.
Powell said the cost runs between $100 and $200 per province per adjuster, and companies have to weigh how many jurisdictions to license each person in. When a single large event hits one province, the staffing math is straightforward. When smaller events hit multiple provinces at the same time, it gets harder.
"It's almost worse because you have to have more people to handle the smaller claims," he said. "So you have to have more people licensed in those multi-jurisdictions."
Once adjusters are licensed and deployed, the next challenge is getting into the affected area. Powell said access is typically the single biggest source of delay on a major wildfire claim – and it is the part of the process that has improved the most in recent years.
He said he was part of the first responder wave during the Fort McMurray wildfire, when adjusters, contractors and engineers were allowed into the evacuated town alongside emergency crews to begin assessing damage before residents were permitted to return.
The priority at that stage is not individual policyholder claims. It is identifying whether the infrastructure that a community needs to function – gas stations, grocery stores, hospitals – can be repaired or replaced quickly enough to allow people to come back.
"To get the infrastructure back, to allow people to get back to a town, they need a gas station, need a grocery store, they need the hospitals back, cleaned up," Powell said.
He said Fort McMurray also illustrated the logistical limits of remote wildfire response. With the town under evacuation, adjusters could not stay on site. The nearest available accommodation was hours away.
"You're driving three hours each way to get to the site and then have to leave, evacuate at the end of the day," he said.
Powell said the industry now has better coordination with local authorities, which has shortened the timeline between an evacuation order being lifted and adjusters getting access.
"Working with the local authorities is allowing us to get earlier access," he said. "We probably won't be the first ones in, but we're shortly thereafter."
Galea said Sedgwick has also built out its internal desk team to support field adjusters remotely, allowing claims to be worked in parallel rather than sequentially.
"You can almost tag-team a claim versus having one person responsible and causing that delay," he said.
He said the combination of wildfire, hail and hurricane seasons overlapping means that the adjusting workforce, the contractor base and the restoration industry are all being asked to respond to multiple events at once – and the firms that have done the licensing, the planning and the pre-positioning before the season starts will be the ones that can actually respond when it hits.
