Florida Emergency Hurricane Preparedness & Recovery

Be Ready! Forceful winds, heavy rain, storm surges, flooding... hurricanes bring an unpredictable level of danger and potential for damage. One of the best ways to mitigate danger and damage is to prepare as much as you can in advance.

Hurricane preparedness is essential for Floridians, especially during the Atlantic hurricane season from June 1 through November 30. Because hurricanes can affect areas over 100 miles inland, all Floridians, coast-to-coast, can be affected by a single storm system depending on size, landfall, and path. One coast can easily experience the devastating destruction of a direct hit while the other coast experiences heavy rainfall and flooding - a sliding scale of severity of damage that no one escapes.

Prepare Your Family

Contact Information, Emergency Kit & Family Plan

Hurricane preparedness starts with simply keeping an up-to-date list of emergency contact and safety information. This can include phone numbers, addresses, websites, emails, and any other relevant data:

• Municipal (county) evacuation level and route
• Local emergency management office
• Law enforcement and fire/rescue
• Local hospitals
• Utilities
• FEMA and American Red Cross

It is also highly advisable to have a Basic Emergency Kit with water, food, radio, flashlights, first aid kit, extra batteries, whistles, dust masks, sanitation wipes, can opener, cell phones with backup batteries and/or chargers, and local maps.

Your emergency kit can be prepared in advance, but should be checked at least annually to replace expired food, drained batteries, and anything else that is no longer working.

For more information on emergency kits, check out this list from Ready.gov.

Finally, have a family plan. Know your emergency evacuation route and location of local shelters. Have emergency meeting places determined in advance for both in your home (small windowless room) and outside of your home (church, library, etc). Families with pets will also need to plan in advance. For more information checkout Ready.gov's Make a Plan.

Prepare Your Home

There are a number of companies that offer services that can help protect your property from severe weather before a storm and help take them down afterwards.

• Hurricane shutters
• Storm panels
• Boarded-up windows
• Boarded-up doors
• Accordion shutters
• Roll-down shutters
• Impact windows
• Impact doors
• Remove fallen or leaning trees
• Remove dead trees
• Trim overgrown trees