Wildfire risk for your home starts with the house upwind.
We estimate wildfire damage risk for individual homes from overhead imagery, building footprints, fences, ground cover and local wind records. Our focus is neighbor exposure: how nearby structures and fences shape your risk when wind drives embers through a neighborhood.
Get in touchWhy neighbors matter
In a wind-driven fire like the 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, homes in suburban neighborhoods often ignite from embers and from each other, not from a wall of flame at the edge of town.
Once one house burns, the next one downwind is exposed. A wood fence between them can carry fire across the gap. So your risk depends on your own property and also on what sits upwind of it.
Most risk scores describe a single property. We look at the neighborhood as a connected system.
What we measure
Each assessment combines public and commercial data for one parcel and its neighbors.
Overhead imagery
Ground cover around the home: lawn, dry grass, mulch, gravel and pavement.
Building footprints
Distance and direction from your home to each nearby structure.
Fences
Fence location and material, including fences that connect homes.
Local wind climatology
Which directions strong winds come from at your location, from nearby weather station records.
Ember transport
A physical model of how wind and embers move around buildings in your neighborhood.
Prioritized actions
A ranked list of fixes, from the home itself out to shared fences and gaps between homes.
Early evidence from the Marshall Fire
We studied 44 homes in the Marshall Fire area, 30 of which were destroyed. The two strongest signals were both about neighbors.
This is a proof of concept. The sample is small and clustered in a few neighborhoods, and the model has not been validated on other fires. We plan to expand the dataset.
Why now
Colorado
HB25-1182, in effect July 1, 2026, requires insurers that use wildfire risk models to give policyholders annual written notice of their risk score. Insurers must offer mitigation discounts, including for community-level mitigation, and let policyholders appeal their score.
California
Since 2022, California's Safer from Wildfires regulation requires insurers to offer discounts for home hardening, defensible space and participation in community programs such as Firewise USA.
Homeowners can now see and contest their scores. Few have an independent way to check them, or to know which fixes matter most for their street.
Who it's for
- HOAs and neighborhoods. A ranked list of which fences and gaps to fix first across the community.
- Fire districts and local mitigation programs. Imagery-based triage to decide which homes get in-person assessments first.
- Homeowners who want to understand or appeal an insurer's wildfire score.
- Mitigation contractors looking for homes where work will matter most.
Contact
SciIntel Analytics is a Colorado company founded in 2022. We are looking for HOAs, fire districts and mitigation programs to pilot neighborhood assessments.