Drone fleets are set to scour Houston devastation for insurance companies

Buzzing drones are hovering above hurricane-ravaged Houston, and they’re being piloted by newly trained insurance agents.

After Hurricane Harvey pummeled Texas with some 19 trillion tons of water — the greatest rainfall event in the history of the continental U.S. — many homes are inaccessible or too dangerous for insurance agents to inspect directly. Now, insurance companies are enlisting the help of drones to observe the damage from above.

Turning agents into skilled drone operators might actually be a wise move for an insurance industry facing extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change in the future.

For example, while hurricanes are triggered by the interactions of complex weather phenomena, not climate change specifically, warmer oceans will almost certainly contribute to future extreme downpours.

It's still unclear how much warming waters contributed to Harvey, but climate change likely played a part in submerging Texas neighborhoods in raging 10-foot high floods, making homes nearly impossible to reach by road.

To assess the damage, Travelers Insurance company has already sent 65 drone-operating agents to Houston, and the company’s vice president of claims told the Associated Press that it plans to train 600 agents to fly drones by early 2018.

This is welcome news for people whose lives have been drowned in historic floodwaters and need recovery assistance. It's also welcome news for those who live anywhere in hurricane country, because more powerful storms, like Hurricane Irma, are on their way and may require agents to survey the ravaged land for damage.

"If you had a good line of sight, for example, but you were stopped by nature or law enforcement from entering an area, you could put a drone in the area and get access to that property," Jim Whittle, chief claims counsel for the American Insurance Association, told the AP. "That could demonstrate immediately that that was a property that had considerable wind damage, let's say, and allow the insurer to cut a check."

But even the most skilled drone operators won’t be able to fly into and navigate inside people’s homes. At some juncture, an agent will have to trade a remote control for a car and assess the flooding devastation in person. Until that time, however, insurance companies will have aerial proof of the devastation, and will be able to offer quicker recovery assistance.

Following Harvey, drone-operating agents may be quite busy during this 2017 hurricane season. The National Hurricane Center says that Hurricane Irma is a Category 5 storm, the highest intensity possible with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour. The storm has already made landfall in the Caribbean before potentially striking southern Florida this weekend.