Wildfire Damage Extraction with API 2.0

Maximize the capabilities within API 2.0 to work better and more efficiently with our post-catastrophe damage data. With wildfire still burning in the greater Los Angeles area and other disaster seasons right around the corner, the ability to use the latest capabilities in API 2.0 are very relevant right now for so many. Strategic partners and even large media outlets were shown how to make use of the steps below to do large scale analysis of the California fires, nearly instantaneously. Some of those new and improved capabilities include:

  • Easy filtering of results to a specific event by using the event name to limit results to just the particular event you are interested in, ignoring fire damage from previous events over the same area.

  • The ability to query large areas and get multiple records back, combined with the ability to filter by damage level, allows for powerful queries like “return all records within 4 kilometers of this location that have a damage score greater than 80”.

  • Paging through results in pages of 500 records allows for manageable responses even when 10,000 records are being returned.

Consider the sample scenario based on the image shown below. The query is to find all of the properties in this circle that have a damage level of at least FEMA 5 (FEMA uses a zero to 6 scale) and are in this 1,100-meter radius. We want to ignore any previous CAT events and focus solely on the Los Angeles fires from 2025.

By specifying what you need in your API call, you can get the returned results you are looking for even if you’ve never written a line of code. Thousands of records can be returned from a query and you can step through them in manageable sets of 500. Below is just a snippet of the returned JSON for a single record. You can see that both the pre-CAT and post-CAT attributes are included.

This is just a quick example of how API 2.0 can quickly and easily help you identify wildfire damage using the three capabilities outlined above. For any additional questions, please connect with our Customer Advocacy team to learn more by filling out the form below.