The Country is Burning, Flooding, and Breaking Records

Source: The Morrill Fire. Source: Nebraska State Patrol

Plus, making risk solvable: a new physics for property protection

Welcome back to This Week in Disasters! This newsletter combines expert perspectives with a weekly roundup of upcoming threats, recent natural disasters, and available survivor assistance. If you’re a Risk, Insurance, Employee Assistance, or Emergency Management professional (or you’re just really curious about disasters in the United States!) you’re in the right place.

Major Disasters of the Last Week

Forecasted Risks for Next Week

A new Kona storm will bring more rain to Hawaii just days after historic rainfall, increasing the risk of flash flooding, mudslides and travel disruptions across the islands through the weekend.

Source: City of Maui

Disasters in the Headlines

Trump’s Homeland Security Pick Says He’d End Policy That Slowed Disaster Aid

The New York Times

FEMA Provides Update on Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program

Homeland Security Today

In Ski Towns, a Bad Snow Year Is Worsening Wildfire Fears

The New York Times

How Do We Pay For Disasters? A Comprehensive Look at Recovery Funding After Hurricane Harvey

Place + Resilience

PRO PERSPECTIVE

Making Risk Solvable: A New Physics for Property Protection

The insurance crisis in wildfire-prone states is not news. Carriers retreating, premiums spiking, communities left exposed. Emergency managers and resilience professionals know this story well. What is less familiar is the argument that the crisis is, at its core, a data problem. And that the solution might come not from policy reform, but from physics.

Jason Mueller, Co-Founder and CPO, and Dan Kahn, Head of Growth, of Stand, a company they describe, deliberately, as a property protection business that also happens to offer insurance. After launching in California roughly a year ago and recently entering Florida, Stand has crossed $3.5 billion in insured value. In that first year, they recorded zero claims.

Stand was built on a straightforward but contrarian premise. "A dollar invested upfront goes far better than waiting for the damage to happen and then scrambling to figure out how to fix it on the back end," Jason explained. That belief shapes everything from how they price risk to how they talk with homeowners.

Where legacy carriers rely on broad, location-based models — zip code assessments that, as Jason noted, "often disagree with one another and change dramatically year over year" — Stand builds a high-fidelity digital twin of each individual property and simulates worst-case conditions against it. The question they are answering is not simply: what is the probability of a fire here? It is: if a fire comes, what is the probability this specific home burns?

"You might have the highest risk threshold for a community in the whole state," Dan said, "but you still probably have a less than 1% chance of a fire in any given year. What if your home only has a one-in-100 shot of burning in the event of a fire? Now you start to do that math."

The model works at extraordinary resolution. It differentiates between tree species, crown density, pruning condition, and structural materials. It accounts for the behavior of single versus double-pane windows under ember exposure. It simulates thermal combustion between specific features on a given parcel. The team behind it includes scientists from NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing.

What This Means in Practice

For brokers and homeowners, the immediate implication is a different kind of conversation. Rather than receiving a blanket non-renewal or a rate that reflects nothing more than geography, Stand can say: here is the specific tree that concerns us. Remove it, and here is what changes in your risk profile and your premium.

"We were hopping on calls with our end-insured and our brokers and saying, this is the tree that gives us pause," Dan said. "How do we make it easy for you to remove it? How do we get to yes?"

The result has been a 90%+ mitigation compliance rate among their customers within 60 days of binding. That number is significant. It suggests that homeowners, when given precise guidance grounded in visible science, will act. "When we show the physics video of the peril moving through their property, they actually see how things move," Jason said. "It is an empowering thing."

For emergency managers and resilience professionals, the operational relevance goes further. Stand is already in conversations with emergency management departments and is developing tools to analyze risk at the community level, not just the individual parcel. Their model can identify the weakest points within a given neighborhood, simulate conflagration dynamics across adjacent properties, and assess what percentage of homes in a given area meet current building code standards.

"Our hope is that we can provide that insight even if we are not insuring the property," Jason said.

The Alignment Challenge

Dan framed the broader challenge with clarity: "How do you align the homeowner with all of the emergency providers, with the capital stack, with the communities to create a full flywheel effect?"

That question sits at the center of what Stand is building toward. Their near-term roadmap includes a homeowner portal that will allow real-time risk modeling, an expansion into convective storm, hurricane, and hail perils using the same physics engine, and a move toward continuous monitoring rather than annual point-in-time underwriting.

The longer arc is more ambitious still. Jason put it plainly: "If we do our jobs right, insurance might not exist at some point, certainly not in the way it does today. We want to build the platform that makes that reality."

Someone You Know Needs This. SBA Disaster Loans Are Open in 25 States.

Across 25 states, SBA disaster loan deadlines are still months away, some as late as November 2026. But most survivors don't know they qualify. If you work with or know anyone affected by a disaster in the past year, this list is worth passing along. A few seconds of sharing could mean thousands of dollars for someone still trying to recover.

Find the SBA Disaster Declarations here

Active Federal Major Disasters

There is usually a 60 day window to apply for help after a disaster is declared.  The following disasters are still actively taking applications from survivors for financial support.

The following disasters are actively taking applications from survivors for financial support. To apply, survivors can visit DisasterAssistance.gov or call the FEMA Helpline at 1-800‑621‑3362.

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