To make Forerunner more secure, we added additional validations and logic to enhance our password requirements. Users creating accounts and updating their passwords will now have additional password length and complexity requirements. User passwords are now required to be 8 characters minimum and have at least one number, one upper case letter and one special character.
Our Preliminary Damage Assessment (PDA) tool helps users capture the initial assessments done for each damaged property following a disaster event. This feature is incredibly important as users assess the level of damage in their community and begin gathering the information necessary to kick off funding and other recovery discussions.
This tool allows users to detail and record the level and types of damages to an individual property and add photos to document what users are 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 make it easy to complete your PDAs out in the field.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, we built out some critical tools in Forerunner to help our impacted partners. One of the features we built out to help with post-disaster recovery is the addition of property-level damage warnings. The four new warnings are:
Property is affected by damageProperty has minor damageProperty has major damageProperty is destroyed by damageThese warnings allow users to add a flag on a property, informing users and the general public that the property has damage and to what extent. They ensure that other Forerunner users in the community know that the property was impacted by an event, avoiding duplication of efforts and increasing 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.
Forerunner users can now toggle all property-level warnings on their Map Layers panel to view warnings on their dashboard map. This feature allows users to get a high-level, visual representation of all relevant warnings and understand their relativity to each other across their entire account. Warnings are colored red or orange based on their severity and appear as dots over properties with exclamation points.
Forerunner displays automated warnings at the top of Property Information Panels and Public Property Profiles to help users track compliance and alert them of existing/potential issues with the property. We generate these warnings for properties using a variety of different logic checks related to: whether or not the property is in the SFHA, differences in the Effective vs. Preliminary FIRM floodzones/BFEs, LFE compliance, Lowest Elevation of Machinery compliance, and SI/SD improvement threshold requirements. Users can now toggle to all available warnings to True or False on each property based on their relevance and accuracy.
Adding these warning customization capabilities makes accounts more valuable, meaningful and accurate which lets users make more informed decisions, have more control over their data and better manage their accounts.
There are a variety of reasons why a user may want to ignore a flagged Elevation Certificate error or warning. The user may want to indicate that the issue was fixed, that the issue is not applicable, or that they have reviewed the EC already. We recently added the ability for users to leave an option note to provide more detail on why they are ignoring the issue. This enhances cross-team communication and tracking on EC Issues.
Per popular request, Forerunner now accommodates three additional FIRM layers from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. The layers include:
These layers are especially valuable for communities in riverine areas who don't have auto-computed Base Flood Elevations (BFEs) for their properties. Floodplain officials use these additional FIRM layers to generate BFEs. To better serve the needs of these communities we added the NFHL layers to the FIRMs section on the Map Layers panel where users can toggle between FIRMs, panels, and the three additional layers.
To give users more control over the properties and data in their accounts, we have added the ability to delete properties. Users with Manager and Member permissions can now delete a property and all associated activity, Elevation Certificates, documents, SI/SD costs and logs. This will make the property no longer accessible through account's internal dashboard and public-facing website.
Per popular request, communities can now set unique logos at the account level to match their community website and further customize their Forerunner application. An uploaded logo will appear on both the lefthand sidebar of the internal dashboard and on the header banner of the public website. Users with manager and member permissions can upload a circular image of their community logo on their account Settings page. Once uploaded, the image will appear for all users in your internal dashboard and all guest users navigating to your public website.
Forerunner users with manager permissions can now update specific account settings directly in their dashboard Settings. With this feature, users have more control over their account's configuration without having to contact the Forerunner team to make revisions. These updates can be made in real-time as communities experience changes in regulations. Users with management permissions can edit their freeboard required for properties in the SFHA, their SI/SD project tracking period, the cumulative SI/SD tracking period length, and the SI/SD project threshold and improvement value adjustment ratio for their communities directly in the Account tab of their Forerunner Settings. For more information on Account Settings visit our Helpdesk documentation.
