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Impacted by Hurricane Ian? Here’s how Forerunner can help.

September 30, 2022
Susanna Pho, CFM

At Forerunner our primary goal is to make floodplain management and resilience planning more efficient for users. Our software is growing every day to meet these needs and it’s expanding to make recovery workflows easier, as well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, we retasked our engineering team to build some critical tools to help our impacted partners. Here's a look at how we can now help with post-disaster recovery: 

Preliminary Damage Assessment Tool

Our Preliminary Damage Assessment (PDA) tool helps you capture the initial assessments done on each damaged property, as you assess the level of damage in your community and begin gathering the information necessary to kick off funding and other recovery discussions. This tool allows your users to detail the amount and types of damages to an individual property, and add photos to an entry so that you can document what you’re seeing on the ground in the immediate aftermath of an extreme weather event. Our goal is to make capturing PDAs quick and efficient, and our mobile-friendly design makes it easy to complete your PDAs out in the field. Here's a quick video describing how it works: 

Property Level Damage Warnings

We’ve also built an updated property warnings feature that allows you to add a flag on a property in Forerunner, warning users and the general public that the property has damage and to what extent. This will allow you to ensure that other Forerunner users in your community know that the property was impacted by the event, avoiding duplication of effort and creating awareness as you begin your recovery. These warnings will also show on your public website, informing the public, especially renters and homeowners, that their property has been reviewed and flagged for damages. Check out the video above to see how it works.

Substantial Damage Tracking

You can use Forerunner to track Substantial Damage costs on every individual property. As damages are added, our system will let you know if the total of damage costs exceed the 50% threshold, requiring a Substantial Damage Letter. If you have a cumulative SI/SD ordinance, your account can be adjusted to account for a longer tracking period or lower percentage. The Substantial Damage Letters you create can also then be uploaded and tracked in Forerunner as a document on our Documents tab. Finally, if you plan to use FEMA’s Substantial Damage Estimate tool, we can provide an export from Forerunner to prefill the tool with our data–a huge time savings. 

Post-Disaster Aerial Imagery

If you receive post-disaster aerial imagery from an internal source, or from FEMA or NOAA, we can bring this imagery into Forerunner as a base map in your account. Our Forerunner partners have done this in the past after disasters like Hurricane Ida to cross-reference properties as they start to process and log damages. Over time, multiple sets of aerial imagery can also provide an opportunity to compare and contrast impacts to properties and the community overall. 

Post-Disaster Resident Communication

In the instance that your community is negatively impacted, it’s important that the public knows the requirements for rebuilding. Forerunner’s Public Flood Website feature can show property owners, contractors, architects, and others the regulatory requirements for rebuilding, ensuring that you stay compliant with the NFIP post-storm.Our Get Help form will also allow residents to reach out with specific questions about their property. It automatically creates a log for this communication in the Forerunner system–allowing you to easily capture the communication for CRS and other logging purposes. If you’re a Forerunner user and you’d like to customize your Get Help form or have questions about your public website, feel free to reach out.

Not a Forerunner partner but impacted by Hurricane Ian? Let us know how we can help! We’re always happy to share more about Forerunner and we offer free pilots so that you can take advantage of these features quickly without obligation. 

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