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The town’s geographic information services staff created the program that combines the town’s disaster assessment system with Beaufort County tax records. The system now lets damage assessors manage information efficiently: instead of filling out several separate forms and then sending them off to county officials, all the information is synced in one program and shared with the county instantly, said Trudie Johnson, the town’s floodplain administrator. The town essentially took existing Federal Emergency Management Agency damage assessment software and improved it, she said.
“We made it really quick, really easy to use,” she said.
Now, when town damage assessors go out after a hurricane or other disaster, they can note the damage to a structure, compare it to the assessed value of the property in county tax records and put a dollar value on the damage immediately.
“It’s important we get this information very, very quickly,” Johnson said.
“We want to get up and running, we want to get federal assistance.”
In 1994, for instance, when a storm flooded about 400 structures, damage assessors had to go out with paper and pencil and look at each building without the benefit of knowing any background information about the property.
“That had a lot of things that were clumsy about it,” she said. “It didn’t talk to or report to any other databases. We had to print out the assessment, copy it into another database. It was very time intensive. It wasn’t doing anything for us.”
The town already agreed to share the new software with the county, Bluffton, Port Royal and Beaufort, she said. Synchronizing the process across the whole county will benefit everyone, she said.
“If we need each others help, we’re all on the same hymnbook,” she said.
