Horry County uses ShareBase to securely store and share video footage

Video Transcript

Tim Oliver, CIO/GIO of Horry County

My name is Sam Oliver and I am the CIO for Horry County South Carolina. Our county is known as the home to Myrtle Beach and we have got about 1,200 square miles and we support the entire IT/GIS department for all our county over 2,500 users throughout the county.

We were mildly affected by Hurricane Irma in a couple of weeks ago and one of the things that is always important is to get the documentation of any damages that might have been done and also working with FEMA immediately. Again, we’ve had a lot of experience considering Hurricane Matthew a year ago and Joaquin two years ago so getting that information out rapidly is extremely important to our local government. One of the first things that we’re tasked with doing after a hurricane or a storm is to go out and fly our drones along the beach to document especially beach lost because the beach is so important to tourism.

We also document any damages or flooding to local neighborhoods but especially with Irma, it was beach re-nourishment considering that we had just spent a great deal of time re-nourishing the beach after Hurricane Matthew so we need to get that information out and also get it to representatives in Washington DC so that they could say, “yes, we were impacted and yes, we did need assistance”.

Last year after Matthew, we actually had to create the videos, edit the videos, and then create secure pages on our county’s website to provide them links and logins to whoever needed to see the video streams that we shot. That was really time consuming. By the time, we had to create all the individual videos and the pages and then, provide the secure passwords to anybody that wanted to access the pages and considering it’s not just upper management at the county, it’s also elected officials in the county that want to see this and then, passing along to the elected officials of DC, so after Matthew, it was a pretty time consuming process. That changed with Irma and the use of ShareBase so, we needed a solution that would get that, enhanced the people that needed to see it much quicker.

The primary reason for us in investing ShareBase was that we needed to get rid of Dropbox. That was being used for valent throughout the county which we were trying to put an end to begin with. So, we invested in ShareBase and to be honest with you, we did a rapid deployment of ShareBase because we deployed it a couple of days after Irma, we could start sharing these documents with the elected officials and with FEMA.

One of the most amazing things to me was I took the SD card out of the drone and I put it in my MacBook, I said, “dropped, drugged and dropped it into the ShareBase folder”. It took about 45 seconds to a minute to upload. I created the link and I shared it with all of the upper management at the county who then in turn, shared it with the people; the elected folks in Washington DC and FEMA that needed to see it so in reality, I was able to do it all. I didn’t have to pass it off to my developer or my video editor. It was just drag-and-drop and it was available to anybody that needed to see it whom we provided the link to.