Article by AL.com – March 2018 – The year is young, but we’ve already seen a wild cyclone, several intense winter weather patterns, and huge temperature fluctuations. You’d imagine we are wary from last year. There were 17 named storms and four hurricanes that made landfall in the United States during 2017. The total damage was around $200 billion—the most expensive hurricane season ever. The late-year California wildfire outbreak is expected to reach $180 billion in damages. Of course, in Alabama, we feel like the next menacing tornado is always around the corner.
The cost of extreme weather is monetary and psychological. Losing all of your possessions, your monuments to achievement, the sense of security for your family—this is why post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses jump after disasters. Our home is more than just things, but we can save peace of mind by documenting all of those valuables in the event that they are lost to disasters or other misfortunes.
You could be old-school and Polaroid every item in your house and paste it to a scrapbook of serial numbers and descriptions . . . but what if that burns up or gets swept away too? This is where cloud storage and apps make a real difference in people’s lives. Last year, Huntsville’s INTUITIVE Research and Technology Corporation (INTUITIVE) released its app inValuables in a partnership with NTUTEK. inValuables was designed to allow you to create a photo catalog of your valuables with your mobile device (even at multiple sites like your home, office, cabin, etc.) with details such as purchase prices, warranties, and serial numbers attached.
Can you inventory everything of value in your home off the top of your head? What about date of purchase, manufacturer, and warranty info? What model number is your washing machine?
After a home disaster or loss event, you can walk through each room with your inValuables app opened on your phone and take stock of what is missing. It will take all of the undue stress out of the insurance collection process. And if your phone gets damaged, no worries—the information will be backed up on iCloud. The app is also useful if you simply have a defective product and have misplaced the paperwork for the warranty.
This isn’t a sales pitch—the app is free. By September of last year, and especially moved by the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, INTUITIVE offered the app for free to make a difference in future disasters. “It was September, and Harvey had devastated the Houston area. With two more storms brewing in the Atlantic and devastating wildfires in California, we felt the need to help.,” says Arlee Sowder, Corporate Relations Specialist at INTUITIVE. But how could an engineering company help in the face of this unpredictability? Developing inValuables and offering it for free was their answer. “Every day, we support our customers in preparing our nation’s Warfighter,” says Sowder. “We took that same approach and applied it to something that everyone can benefit from. inValuables promotes preparedness — it’s always best to be proactive rather than reactive.”
Download the app here to prepare for the worst. INTUITIVE is an aerospace engineering and analysis firm entrusted by the Department of Defense for many defense projects—you will be in good hands should you need their support staff.