Hurricane Preparedness: 30-Day Florida Home Countdown

If you wait until the cone is on the news, you have already lost. By the time a named storm appears in the Atlantic, retail flood barriers are gone from the shelves, contractors are not picking up the phone, and any work you needed done is now competing with the panic of half of Florida. The properties that come through hurricane season clean are not the ones that scrambled in the last 72 hours. They are the ones that started in early May, or earlier.

This is the protocol our concierge team runs across hundreds of Florida properties every spring. We have organized it as a 30-day countdown that ends one week before official storm-season start on June 1. Treat it as a checklist, not a suggestion. Each week’s tasks build on the last.

Week 4 (Days 30–22): Audit and Document

The goal this week is to know what you have, what condition it is in, and what the gaps are. You can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t claim what you can’t document.

• Walk the property exterior. Photograph every elevation, every door, every window, every exterior fixture. Date-stamp the photos.
• Walk the interior, room by room. Photograph and inventory anything of value. Cabinetry, appliances, finishes, electronics. This becomes your insurance baseline if you ever file a claim.
• Pull your insurance policies. Property, flood, hurricane (yes, sometimes separate), and any HOA master policy. Read the deductible, read the exclusions, look for “sliding door” and “wind-driven rain” specifically. We covered why in our piece on the sliding-door insurance gap.
• Identify your barriers and protection. What flood barriers do you own? Where are they stored? Do they still fit? Is the storage accessible without moving 20 boxes of Christmas decorations?
• Locate and test your generator. If you own one. Run it under load for at least 30 minutes. Check fuel storage and stabilizer.

Week 3 (Days 21–15): Schedule Everything

This is the booking week. Every contractor, every inspection, every install. Lead times are still manageable; in two weeks they won’t be.

• Schedule barrier inspection or installation. If you own flood barriers, have them professionally inspected for fit and condition. If you don’t have them yet, this is the week to schedule installation. After mid-May, calendars start filling.
• Book a roof inspection. A licensed roofer should walk your roof and document loose fasteners, lifted shingles or panels, and any soft spots. Damage caught now is repairable; damage caught after the storm is a claim battle.
• Trim trees and palms. Anything within 10 feet of the structure. Anything that looks dead or dying anywhere on the property. Tree-service backlogs in Florida double by mid-May.
• Schedule your gutter cleaning. Clogged gutters force water sideways into the structure. A 30-minute job in April becomes a five-figure repair after a storm.
• Order or refresh emergency supplies. Generator fuel (with stabilizer), water, batteries, propane, non-perishable food, prescription meds for at least 14 days, cash in small denominations.

Week 2 (Days 14–8): Test, Confirm, Document

By now the work scheduled in Week 3 should be happening or complete. This week is about verifying everything actually works.

• Deploy and retract every flood barrier on your property. Do a full dry run. The first time you deploy a barrier should never be during a real storm.
• Confirm interior leak detection is online. If you have a system like PipeBurst Pro™, verify every sensor reports correctly and the auto-shutoff valve actuates. Read our leak-detection ROI piece if you don’t have a system yet.
• Charge backup battery banks and devices. Phones, radios, lights, weather radios.
• Confirm storm shutter operation if you have them. Open and close every panel.
• Set up your storm communication plan. Family, tenants, building management, contractors. Who calls whom in what order?

Week 1 (Days 7–2): Final Sweep

One week out. Now you are watching the tropics and finishing the small details that hurt if you skip them.

• Final walk-through with photos. Date-stamped condition record of the property as of today.
• Move outdoor furniture to staging. Inside the garage if possible, or strapped down. Patio umbrellas come down. Pool toys go inside.
• Refill prescriptions and pharmacy needs. Pharmacies get crushed when a storm forms.
• Top off vehicle fuel tanks. Gas station lines spike at the first storm watch.
• Confirm your ride or evacuation route. If a mandatory evacuation is called, where do you go? Is the house there expecting you?

Day-Of: When the Storm Is Real

This is no longer preparation. This is execution. If Week 4 through Week 1 went well, this should be a 4-hour day, not a panicked 24-hour scramble.

• Deploy flood barriers. Sliding door barriers. Garage barriers. Lobby barriers. Anything that closes ground-level openings to water.
• Close shutters or install panels. Last things before you leave the property.
• Power down non-essential electronics. Reduces fire risk during power surges.
• Take a final photo set. Everything closed, deployed, documented.
• If a mandatory evacuation has been called, leave. Property protection is finished by now. Your job is to be alive on the other side of the storm.

The Most Common Failures

Across hundreds of properties, the failures we see most often are not exotic. They are the same handful of things, year after year:

1. Late starts. Properties that begin the work in May find themselves competing for contractor time and supplies. Mid-April is the sweet spot.
2. Untested barriers. Owners discover during a real storm that their flood barriers no longer fit because the building settled, or because the gaskets dry-rotted, or because they were stored against a hot wall and warped.
3. Forgotten interior leak risk. Most property owners obsess over exterior protection and ignore the fact that an empty home with a hot water heater on is a higher leak risk than a home occupied during a storm. A burst pipe in an empty house is its own disaster timeline.
4. Missing documentation. When a claim happens, you need photos from before and after. Without them, you are negotiating from a weak position.
5. Going it alone. Property managers who try to run this checklist across multiple buildings without help inevitably miss something. That is exactly why our Concierge Program exists.

30 days is enough. 14 is not. Start now.