My earliest encounter with the concept of slope—though I didn't know it by name then—was as shocking as it was unexpected.
I was about four years old, fishing with my father by a stream in the Cascade mountains. It's a fragmented memory – walking along the bank, the stream rumbling past, then the earth giving way beneath my feet. I tumbled, landing face first on the muddy ground beside the water. I was so stunned, I laid there without moving.
My father's quick reflexes saved me from what could have been a more serious situation, and the ordeal taught me an important lesson: slope, big or small, is no laughing matter. Unless you’re my dad, who found it hilarious.
Slope, the underappreciated risk
Slope is essentially how steep the ground is, a simple ratio of vertical elevation to horizontal distance. Yet, this elementary concept belies the complex, often dramatic implications for property and safety.
Picture a row of homes perched on a crumbling cliff, their foundations a few feet from a steep, unforgiving descent. You may not have to imagine it. There may be several in your book of business! The view may be great, but the risk is high.
For insurance companies, slope isn’t just about topography; it’s a forerunner of losses from landslides, earthquakes, floods, and severe wind exposure. The challenge for insurers is not only recognizing these risks but quantifying them with precision and incorporating the associated risk into policy pricing. It’s a task usually fraught with difficulty, often resulting in best estimates instead of real understanding.
The evolution of slope assessment
Historically, determining the slope of a property required approximation and significant manual labor. Determining the slope of a property with a high degree of accuracy along even a single line was both time-consuming and costly – from poring over topographic maps, which require a level of expertise to interpret, to running a stringline across a property, and burdensome, expensive physical land surveys.
Even newer digital tools - satellite imagery and digital mapping technologies - often result in rough estimations that barely scratch the surface of true risk assessment.
These scenarios underscore the compelling need for precise, accessible, and comprehensive slope data. That’s what drove us, at WSRB and BuildingMetrix, to innovate beyond conventional methodologies.
SlopeScout: Innovation to meet your needs
The development of SlopeScout isn’t just an exercise in technological advancement; it’s a response to the clear, significant needs of the insurance industry. By harnessing the power of 3DEP's Lidar and IfSAR technologies, SlopeScout offers you an unprecedented level of accuracy in slope measurement in all directions from a structure. You get the property’s slope, not in a single line, but in 360 degrees – translating complex topographical data into actionable insurance insights within minutes.
With SlopeScout, you can now assess the slope of any property with a few clicks, peeling back the layers of risk with precision and ease. This capability is not just a leap forward in technology but a complete shift in how we can perceive and manage risk. It marks a transition from viewing slope as a sometimes-insurmountable challenge to a measurable, manageable part of underwriting property insurance.
This tool embodies our ethos at WSRB: transforming challenges into opportunities for innovation. In this case, turning the unpredictable nature of slope into a quantifiable metric. With SlopeScout, you can embrace a better approach to assessing slope risk and begin evaluating slope in 360 degrees today.
My hard fall into the mud as a four-year-old, along with seeing losses over the years from insufficient risk assessment, highlight a fundamental truth: understanding and innovation are the best path to identifying, quantifying, and managing risk.
We’re looking forward to serving you with SlopeScout. Check it out today and keep an eye out for many more innovations to come.
