A top executive in an American fire prevention business has called on Bermuda for help with wildfire and conflagration risk.

Speaking in a panel at the Bermuda Risk Summit Loren Davis, director of risk and catastrophe analytics at Wildfire Defence Systems, said Bermuda has always been known as a space for innovation and experimentation.

“Whether it is including new forms of catastrophe modelling, research or new engineering techniques to couple with traditional modelling, that would be something that Bermuda could do to really help push forward progress and wildfires as a peril,” Mr Davis said.

WDS provides private-sector, proactive wildfire protection and loss-prevention services, often on behalf of insurance companies for high-risk properties in the United States and Canada.

The company specialises in pre-treating homes with fire-blocking gels, installing temporary sprinkler systems and clearing flammable vegetation to protect structures. They claim a 99 per cent success rate.

Mr Davis said in the past, the industry has typically modelled wildfire as a peril by looking strictly at occurrence. Now catastrophe modellers are also taking into account severity and vulnerability of structures.

“But we still haven’t changed the fundamental data sets that are underlying modelling for wildfire to accommodate for wildfire induced urban conflagration,” he said.

A wildfire is an uncontrollable fire that usually begins in the wilderness and is largely fuelled by natural vegetation. A conflagration, on the other hand, occurs when a wildfire spreads to the built environment.

Radiant heat sets a structure on fire an that in turn sets another structure on fire.

David Torgerson, executive chairman and founder of Wildfire Defence Systems, regularly goes directly into urban conflagrations, such as the Pacific Palisades fire in January 2025, to research what is driving the flames and how to prevent them.

During the January 2025 wildfires he described entering California neighbourhoods and seeing fire trucks just sitting there.

He said fire engines and other equipment only work if fire fighters can get out of the truck.

In this situation they could not do that because it put their own lives in jeopardy. They could not breathe the air because it was full of smoke and because so much of the neighbourhood was on fire, they could not get the required 350ft from the burning structures.

Mr Torgerson also commonly sees overloaded fire hydrants designed for a one-house fire not an entire neighbourhood in flames.

Panellist Anne Cope is chief engineer at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS). Her organisation provides research on fires and weather events to insurers.

“We do all kinds of messy, destructive, smelly testing,” she said. “We burn things down. We have an ember generator in the facility where we can throw the windborne embers in a realistic wind environment to see where they go and how they ignite things.”

She said it is often common household “stuff” that causes homes to ignite during a conflagration, such as trash tins outside or hot tubs in the yard.

“People often thinks the water in a hot tub would prevent it from flaming,” Dr Cope said. “No — there is plenty of plastic and little nooks and crannies in the hot tub. It will burn down and it will take the home with it.”

She said trash cans will also “take out” a home.

“They burn,” she said. “Then we can tell what kind of coffee maker you had, because all that is left is the little metal rings from the coffee pods you used.”

Covering gutters, putting away trash tins and sweeping the yard of debris can reduce a homeowners risk of conflagration.