Horry County assessors pinpoint flood damage to homes, businesses

As flood waters drop in some Horry County neighborhoods, home and business owners have started surveying the property damage left by the storm. County officials have also sent their own teams of assessors to pinpoint which areas were hit hardest.

The assessors were working their way through Garden City Beach on Wednesday morning for “rapid-fire” assessments, said Robin Fowler, chief inspector with Horry County. Fowler was working with Teresa Stephenson, county assessor, to scan the damage on homes on Vista Drive.

“We’re just trying to find the damage so that when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) comes through they’ll have a better starting point,” Fowler said.

The county sent out groups of two assessors throughout the area to survey damage to homes and businesses. The “rapid-fire” assessments are just meant to give county officials a quick glance at what areas were most affected by the flooding, and by how much.

The county will return to the damaged areas later to do more detailed surveys, Fowler said.

Residents can also call FEMA to report damage to their homes, though county assessors probably noted the damage during their survey, Stephenson said.

“If [residents] had three feet of water throughout the subdivision, we probably got them,” Stephenson said. “But if it’s only two inches, we could have missed it. So just call to make sure.”

To save time and paperwork, assessors use an iPad application that measures home damage and pinpoints the exact location. County officials can mark which home or business has damage and how much with a colored dot; each color represents a different percentage of damage.

A green dot, for example, is only 25 percent damage. A red dot equates to 100 percent destruction, Stephenson said.

The data then instantly uploads to the county’s system where it can be viewed and logged by officials.

“If we had to physically write it down, and log it, and bring it back to the county to plug it in, it would take all day,” Stephenson said.

The application – with real-time data – takes away some of that hassle.

“All that paperwork would be ridiculous,” Stephenson said.

The iPads also allow officials at the Emergency Management office in Conway to study the data quickly before assessors even make it back to the office, Fowler said. That gives those officials the ability to determine which plots of land still need surveying and prevents overlap from assessment crews.

It also lets the county know how many crews to send out every day, Fowler said.

“We send what we need to send when we need it,” he said.

Horry County wasn’t the only agency surveying damage Wednesday. National Weather Service officials began surveying the damage along the Waccamaw River so the federal agency can pinpoint with more accuracy where flooding will occur in the future.

There are four gauges along the Waccamaw River in Horry County that officials will be examining, as well as touring sections of the river where severe flooding was unexpected.

Steven R. Pfaff, warning coordination meteorologist, said that what officials expect to learn this week, will allow them to forecast with greater accuracy exactly which streets will flood in future events and the severity of the flooding.

“If we don’t come out and do these types of surveys and we are faced with these high levels again in a future event, we’ll be forecasting with a limited amount of information, so we’re trying to fill those gaps,” Pfaff said.

“There’s a lot of growth going on along the river with our infrastructure and these communities evolve, so the impacts change. So when we see something like this occur, as bad as it was, we have to take advantage of what’s going on to have a better picture for future events,” Pfaff said.

Horry County officials should have the full number of flood damaged homes and businesses later this week, according to Lisa Bourcier, spokeswoman for the county. More detailed reports of damage will be available in the next few weeks, she said.

This story was originally published October 7, 2015 at 6:37 PM with the headline "Horry County assessors pinpoint flood damage to homes, businesses."