Know what broke, and where, while the crew is still standing there.
Storm Assessment turns a phone into a damage-reporting tool for utility and restoration crews. GPS, severity, photos and voice notes — tied to your poles, queued when there's no signal, and on the dispatcher's map the moment there is. The office stops waiting for the drive back.
iPhone · iOS 15+ · Android in development
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The damage is assessed twice, and neither time is any good.
Once in the field, on paper or in a text message. Again back at the office, where somebody retypes it into a spreadsheet and hunts for the photos in a crew member's camera roll. By the time it is a document anyone can act on, the information is hours old and half of it is missing.
Location is a description
"Third pole past the church on 612." Accurate to whoever wrote it, and to nobody else.
No signal means no report
The worst damage is where the service is worst. Crews write it down and hope to remember.
The FEMA claim starts from scratch
Weeks later, someone reconstructs the restoration from texts, invoices and memory to substantiate a Public Assistance claim.
One pass, from the damage to the filing.
Numbered because it is an order, not a list. Each step ends where the next one starts.
A crew member reports it standing next to it
GPS coordinates, a severity tier, photos from the camera, and a note dictated rather than typed — because nobody types accurately with gloves on at 2am. The report is tied to the nearest pole in your own data automatically.
It sends itself when there's coverage
No signal is the normal case in a storm, not the exception. The report is held on the phone and goes the moment coverage returns. Nothing is lost, and nothing gets re-entered.
Dispatch sees it on the map as it lands
Pins colored by your severity scale, over aerial imagery or streets, with your poles as a layer. Triage from what's actually out there instead of from a call log.
Status moves as the work moves
In queue, crew dispatched, crew on site, restored — your workflow, your words. Restored work drops off the live map so what's left is what's left.
The filing is already written
Close the event and pull three things: a PDF of every report with its photos, a shapefile for the state and your own GIS, and a damage inventory in FEMA’s Public Assistance field structure — ready to paste into the template you download from Grants Portal. No reconstruction six weeks later, because every report was located and timestamped when it was made.
Built for the conditions, not the demo.
Works with no service
Reports queue on the device and sync themselves. The feature that matters most is the one you only notice when it isn't there.
Your form, not ours
You decide what the app asks — pole number, circuit, energized line, road blocked. Change it from the dashboard and the phones pick it up.
Your severity scale
Name the tiers what your crews already call them and pick their colors. Those colors are exactly what the map shows.
Your poles on the map
Load your pole layer and crews see it around them, searchable by pole number. Reports link to the nearest pole within about 60 metres.
Voice instead of typing
Dictated notes, in the rain, in gloves, in the dark. The detail you lose is the detail nobody records.
An audit trail that stays put
Every status change, who made it, exactly when — append-only. It is the record a state or federal reviewer asks for, so it is never overwritten.
Storm events, not loose reports
Group a restoration under a named event. Everything filed during it is tagged automatically, and it comes back out as one package.
A FEMA damage inventory, already written
Export the event as a CSV in FEMA’s Public Assistance field structure — category, facility, coordinates, description, percent complete — to paste into the template from Grants Portal. Cost and labor type are left for you; the app will not invent a figure for a federal claim.
Contractors walled off from each other
Each company sees only its own reports, poles and people. Bring in mutual aid without giving anyone the run of your data.
It reads your GIS. It doesn't replace it.
Your system of record stays your system of record. Storm Assessment pulls your poles from it and hands the storm's output back in formats your GIS staff already use.
Pull poles from what you already run
Point it at a live feature service and it refreshes nightly on its own. Anything built on an Esri geodatabase works the same way.
- ArcGIS
- ArcFM
- Futura / GIS+
- Feature Service URL
Not on Esri? Still fine.
Upload a shapefile, or publish a scheduled export to a web address and it collects it. Re-uploads match on your own pole ID — poles that disappear from a newer file are retired, not deleted, so old reports still point somewhere real.
- Shapefile
- GeoJSON
- Scheduled export
- WGS84
Hand the storm back as data
Every event exports as a shapefile, and reports are available as a live GeoJSON layer you can bring straight into QGIS or ArcGIS Pro while the restoration is still running.
- Shapefile export
- GeoJSON layer
- Event PDF
- FEMA damage inventory
Already using Storm Assessment?
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Written by someone who has done the assessing.
Silver Creek Services is a utility distribution design and GIS consultancy in Virginia, run by Josh Good, with fifteen years in the utility industry — distribution design, GIS consulting and field data collection for electric utilities, cooperatives and contractors.
Storm Assessment exists because the damage-assessment step was the one that kept getting done on paper. It is built around how restoration actually runs: the coverage is bad, the crew is tired, the person reading the report is not the person who wrote it, and somebody has to file the whole thing with a state agency six weeks later.
Every default in it — the severity tiers, the status workflow, the 60-metre pole snap, the documentation export — is a decision that came out of that work, and every one of them is something you can change.
The details a GIS manager asks about.
| Phone app | iPhone, iOS 15 or later. Free on the App Store; sign-in requires an account issued by your company. Android in development. |
|---|---|
| Dashboard | Browser-based. Aerial imagery, hybrid or street basemaps; pins colored by severity or by status. |
| Offline behaviour | Reports, photos and notes are stored on the device and transmitted automatically when connectivity returns. |
| Coordinate system | WGS84 / EPSG:4326. Files in another projection are rejected with a message rather than imported into the wrong place. |
| Pole ingest | Shapefile upload, live Esri feature service with nightly automatic pull, or a scheduled export URL (shapefile or GeoJSON). |
| Pole association | A new report links to the nearest active pole within roughly 60 m, matched on your own pole ID field. |
| Exports | Per storm event: a PDF summary with each report's photos, GPS coordinates, severity and timestamps; a shapefile; and a CSV damage inventory carrying FEMA's Public Assistance fields (Category of Work, facility, address, coordinates, description, % complete). Plus a live GeoJSON feed of reports. The inventory is supporting documentation to paste into the template from Grants Portal — it is not a FEMA form and files nothing on your behalf. |
| Roles | Field user, operator (status changes), and administrator (settings and team). |
| Separation | Each company's reports, poles, people and settings are isolated from every other company's. |
| Audit | Status history is append-only: who changed what, and when, is retained for the life of the record. |
See it against your own poles.
Send us a pole export and we'll stand up a working account on your own data, so you're looking at your service territory rather than a sample.