This application was designed for emergency managers who are tasked with evaluating the property damage to an area immediately following a hazard event. Working with building inspectors, these professionals survey vast areas of damage in the first hours following an event. The results of such surveys often support federal disaster declaration requests. These operators are not geographic information system (GIS) analysts, so the application must be easy to understand and apply.

The Damage Assessment Tool is an ArcView® 3.1 application that was developed for New Hanover County. This extension can be used with any other city or county parcel data; the database must first be converted into an ArcView shapefile and certain fields must be present. If these fields contain data, those data will be incorporated into the tool. If the fields are empty, the tool will still work but will require additional input from the operators to populate the fields. Following are the required fields:

LU - land use codes

PID - Unique parcel identifiers

STADDRESS - Property address

RCN - Assessed value of the structure on the property (it must be a numeric

field).

Loading the Damage Assessment Tool Extension

The Damage Assessment Tool was written using Avenue® code with the Dialog Designer®. For users with ArcView version 3.1, the application is ready for immediate operation. The Damage Assessment Tool extension (damage.avx) must be placed into the $AVHOME\av_gis30\ext32 directory within the ESRI home directory. The damage.avx extension can be found on the cd in the /software/exten directory. The Damage Assessment Tool is now ready for use.

Getting Started

• Open ArcView.
• From the File menu, select Extensions.
• Scroll until Damage Assessment Tool is found. Enable the extension by placing a check in the box to the left of the Damage Assessment Tool.
• With the extension loaded, four new tools will appear in the view along with the standard ArcView interface.

• The user must add a parcel theme to the view. This must remain as the first (top-most) active theme.

• To add a theme, select Add Theme in the View menu.

• Navigate to the directory containing the desired parcel theme.

• Select the theme and click OK: the parcel theme is now in the view but not visible.

• To make it visible, check the box next to the parcel name as shown in the below illustration. This will enable the data display within the view.

• To make a theme active, click the theme's name or legend in the Table of Contents. The theme will highlight to show it is active.

Figure 4.30. Example of the view containing an active parcel theme that is visible
 

Choosing Parcels

The first step is to select a property from the parcel theme to be evaluated for damage.
is used to select a property.

• To select a property, click the tool illustrated above.
  

• Move your mouse into the view containing the parcel theme.
  

• Single or multiple parcels can be selected for housing, but business and public assistance facilities must be entered individually. To select a single parcel of any type, slide the mouse over the desired parcel and single click. The parcel will turn yellow and a black dot will mark the selected parcel. For multiple selections on houses, hold the Shift key down and single click on the desired parcels. As parcels are selected, they will turn yellow and a black dot will automatically be placed in the parcel.
  

Figure 4.31. Example of a parcel selected using the select tool.

• Note: Once a record is added, the parcel will revert back to its original color and the black dot will remain to mark properties visited. The black dot is a simple graphic and can be deleted by selecting it with the black pointer, (the second tool from the left on the view interface). Once the graphic is selected, four black handles will surround the dot, and the Delete key can be used to remove the selected graphics.

Filling Out the Form

A second tool  is used to activate a form that allows a user to fill in damage and property information, which is then added to a database of damaged property. 
 

• Select the running man icon and choose the type of property that is being visited. The three categories are Housing, Public Assistance, and Business, based on the three forms required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA requires separate forms depending on the type of structure damaged:
  Please note that the user should be somewhat familiar with the information required from FEMA because the tool is recording information required from the three Damage Assessment forms.
  

1. Housing Damage Assessment (EM39-A REV 9/90)
2. Business Damage Assessment (EM 40-A REV 9/90)
3. Public Assistance Damage Assessment (EM 40 REV 9/90).

Figure 4.32. Example of the menu that appears to choose an assessment type

• Select the appropriate form. When a property type has been selected, a form will appear.

  
  Figure 4.33. Example of a housing form used in assessing the damage

  The user should then select the appropriate choices or fill in the desired information. If the user realizes that incorrect sites have been selected, the selection may be cleared. To deselect the highlighted set, use the Cancel button.

Damage Assessment Files

Files are created based on the date the assessment was conducted and what type of property was assessed. For example, a file containing housing damage created on May 4 1999, will be named H-05041999.dbf. A file created on May 4, 1999 containing damage to business facilities will be named B-05041999.dbf. A public assistance facility that was visited on May 4 1999, would create a file named PA-05041999.dbf. All files are created in the working directory specified by the user.

To learn how to change or set this directory, click here. The illustration below provides an example of a subdirectory titled damage_reports, containing a number of damage assessment files.
 

Figure 4.34. Example of directory showing naming conventions of an assessment file
 

Printing the Report

A third tool  creates a hard copy form that is required by FEMA when applying for financial relief. This is in an ArcView layout format.

Figure 4.35. Example of a hard copy FEMA form

• When data collection is complete, the user may need to provide a printed copy of the form for federal processing. Select the tool shown above.

• Choose the file for the data that you want to print. (Remember that the data are stored using "H-", "B-" or "PA-" followed by the date (MMDDYYYY). Select the type of form you want printed and the date the data were collected.)

All hard copy forms print out on paper 8.5 inches by 14 inches. The forms created are ArcView layouts with dimensions of 8.5 inches by 14 inches, which can be printed by a printer that handles that page size. The forms can be accessed and printed by clicking on the layout document in the project window, selecting the file, and clicking the Print button. The printable layouts have "_1" or "_2" appended to the file name, as shown below; this represents page numbers. Notice in the below illustration the two printable pages representing housing assessment conducted on December 10, 1999 in the project window (h-12101999_1 and h-121-1999_2).

Figure 4.36. Example of a project window containing
two housing forms to be printed
 

Reviewing the Sites Visited

A fourth tool  allows the user to code the parcels based on whether or not there has been an assessment completed at a particular property. No data are being built with this button; it simply provides a method by which assessors may visualize which properties they have visited. This could be important, for example, at the end of the day when a user would be interested in viewing the sites they visited that day.

• Select the tool. A dialog box will appear requesting that the user select any number of files created during the assessment. Once selected, all parcels visited will be colored red. All parcels not yet visited will be colored green.

Figure 4.37. Example of selecting a file name

• To cancel or discontinue the parcel coloring, select the tool and hit the Cancel button; this will return the colors of all parcels to green.