About RedZone

RedZone boasts the best-in-class expertise on wildfires and their impact on homes and businesses. We serve our clients and their clients by aiding in the protection of property and assets, enhancing customer engagement and improving financial performance.

We are recognized as the leaders in wildfire modeling because of our unique combination of emergency management expertise combined with an enterprise-class analytical mapping platform. By combining advanced machine learning algorithms and highly trained analysts, our modeling solution provides the highest accuracy and reliability on the market.

While RedZone specializes in wildfires, our platform can be used to analyze other natural disaster events including hurricanes, earthquakes, and severe weather.

The Early Days

RedZone was founded in 2002 by Clark Woodward, a geographer and volunteer firefighter in Colorado.

During Clark’s experience as a volunteer firefighter, he recognized a need for a better mapping system that accurately identified vital assets like homes, water sources, and helicopter landing zones, which firefighters could update as needed. He partnered with his sister Allison MacCormick, a software programmer, to create software which output digital pre-plan map books which provided a single source for critical information during major fires. Soon this pre-plan software was in demand by agencies across the West. For the next six years, RedZone was the mapping software used across the western U.S. by wildland firefighters.

In 2009, RedZone shifted it’s market to serve commercial entities including insurance and public utilities. In the last decade, we’ve created an innovative suite of software products designed to provide clients with the intelligence they need to be informed of a wildfire or other catastrophic event so they can make important business decisions before, during and after.

In 2010, the RedZone pre-plan book was an invaluable tool when fighting the Four Mile Canyon wildfire, when firefighters came from all over the country to assist in the fight. At the time, this was the most devastating and expensive wildfire in Colorado history.

RZAlert

RedZone felt the need to broaden the access to their valuable intelligence and analytics on wildfires. We ported our applications to the cloud (before the cloud existed) and deployed software that could map homes to wildfires in near real-time. This map could also show the relation of the fire towards the home or asset, providing a better picture of wildfire. Since 2006, RedZone has created an email notification system and web-based dashboard, RZAlert, so companies can effectively manage their incident response programs.

RZRisk

In 2007, RedZone was approached by a major insurer to adapt the mapping software in order to manage their own internal wildfire protection unit. RedZone created a hazard model to support underwriting in California for this insurance client, but soon realized that any insurance company could benefit from this model. From here, the RZRisk product was born.

RZIntel

In 2011, RedZone opened the Wildfire Intelligence Center in San Diego, California. This operations control center provides clients with interactive decision support and analysis when assets are threatened by an impending natural disaster.

RZExposure

In 2018, RedZone released RZExposure, which provided a new way to look at wildfire hazard through a probabilistic model. This model could find patterns in the algorithm in an area with a history of fires burning over and over again. This allowed any insurer or asset owner to look at the bigger picture when evaluating wildfire risk.

Pandemic-proof

During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, more insurers turned to RedZone to help manage and identify wildfire risk, as most people were not traveling and relied more on technology and automation.

RedZone Impact

Serving the Community

RedZone is actively involved in the wildfire firefighter community. Our staff volunteers as emergency responders for local Incident Management Teams and make themselves available to respond to disasters in our communities and regions.

During the 2013 Boulder Flood, RedZone created a free iOS app that allowed local first responders to navigate through the devastating floods that spilled over Boulder Creek and the surrounding watersheds and communities.

RedZone also sponsors and operates two websites that benefit the firefighter community:

WildfireIntel.org

is a free and open forum for firefighters to discuss everything wildfire, from health and safety to active incidents.

WLFAlwaysRemember.net

is a website dedicated to the wildland firefighters who gave their lives fighting wildfires.

We ensure these websites are free, open-source, and regularly updated for our community – it is a sense of pride for us to serve this way.

Looking Ahead

Every year, wildfires get bigger and more devastating, causing record numbers of home loss. This makes it harder for homeowners to get insurance and for insurance companies to understand the risk involved. Insurance companies have also had to adapt to the fast-moving nature of wildfire events and the devastation they cause, forcing them to become more responsive and innovative.

Since 2002, RedZone has always been able to step up and proactively meet the needs of our clients. Moving forward, we are poised to meet the challenges in the decade ahead and we will continue to:

  • share our wildfire real-time intelligence with anyone involved or impacted by a wildfire.
  • provide the highest accuracy and reliability on the market.
  • create innovative solutions to help our clients monitor and protect their assets.
  • ensure our clients have a comprehensive understanding of effective wildfire strategies and risk mitigation.
  • alert our clients a wildfire event is happening before it even hits the news.
  • serve as the voice for insurance carriers to stay connected to their clientele to keep them informed during a time of crisis.