When Satellite and Street Views Disagree: Cross-View Complementarity in Disaster Damage Assessment

Satellite and street-view imagery see different parts of a damaged building: roofs from above, facades and debris from the ground. Average accuracy hides whether fusion methods use this complementary evidence. We study the conflict cases, the samples on which independently trained single-view models disagree, as a diagnostic subset. On paired collections from the 2025 Eaton wildfire and Hurricanes Ian and Milton, conflicts make up 9.6-33.2% of the test data. Fusion improves conflict accuracy over either view, yet an oracle that selects the correct single view per conflict remains 0.19-0.32 above the best evaluated fusion method. A linear fusion gate over building-visibility features, calibrated confidences, and disagreement recovers part of this headroom where ground photographs are aimed at the building: on Eaton it beats end-to-end fusion by +0.072 conflict accuracy p < 10^-4 and calibrated averaging by +0.051 p = 0.0001; on the panoramic hurricane datasets it is indistinguishable from end-to-end fusion. Cropping panoramas toward the building raises the conflict gain of fusion, whereas random crops of the same size do not. The spatial density of conflicts, computed without labels, correlates with tile-level wildfire damage Spearman r = 0.615, 25 tiles. Conflict cases thus show how much complementary evidence fusion uses, which view it carries under each hazard and capture setting, and where current methods fall short.