Hurricane Season: The Home Plan That Has to Be Finished Before the First Watch

Almost everything written about hurricane preparation is about the house: shutters, water, batteries, the evacuation route. This guide is about the other half, the half people leave until the roof is already open - deciding which companies you would call, and checking them while there is still time to check anything. The season gives you months of notice. The warning gives you a day and a half.

The season, and the part of it that matters

The National Hurricane Center states the window plainly: the Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, and the eastern Pacific season from May 15 to November 30. Within that window the risk is not flat. NHC puts the statistical peak of the Atlantic season at September 10, with the busiest stretch running from mid-August to mid-October.

Read that as a calendar for the work below rather than as a forecast. A season that stays quiet until August is still a season, and a storm in June counts exactly as much to the house it hits. What the dates tell you is when the last comfortable moment to prepare has gone.

What a watch and a warning actually buy you

The National Weather Service defines the alerts by lead time, and the lead time is the whole point:

• A Hurricane Watch means hurricane conditions (sustained winds of 74 mph or greater) are possible within your area, and it is issued 48 hours in advance.
• A Hurricane Warning means those conditions are expected somewhere within the specified area, and it is issued 36 hours in advance.
• A Tropical Storm Watch and Warning carry the same 48 and 36 hour lead times for sustained winds of 39 to 73 mph.

The National Hurricane Center is explicit about why those hours are not spare time: emergency managers plan on having their evacuations complete and their personnel sheltered before the onset of tropical storm-force winds. Thirty-six hours is the window for boarding up and leaving. It is not the window for working out who your roofer is.

Why the contractor work is pre-season work

After a storm, three things change at once, and all three work against a careful decision.

1. Demand outruns the local trade. Every damaged street is calling the same companies in the same week, and the honest answer from a booked local firm is a date weeks out. That gap is what gets filled by whoever knocks on the door.
2. The state raises the legal stakes, which tells you what the state expects. Florida makes the point in statute: under section 489.127 of the Florida Statutes, an unlicensed person who acts in the capacity of a contractor during the existence of a state of emergency declared by executive order of the Governor commits a felony of the third degree. The same conduct outside an emergency is a lesser offense. Legislatures do not raise a penalty for conduct they consider rare.
3. Prices come under a special rule, which means prices are expected to move. Florida's price-gouging section, 501.160, switches on when the Governor declares a state of emergency and runs for a limited period from the declaration. It treats as evidence of an unconscionable price a gross disparity between what is charged and the average price charged in the usual course of business in the 30 days before the declaration, unless the increase is explained by the seller's own added costs or by market trends.

The pre-season checklist that is about people, not plywood

1. Decide which trades you would actually need. For most storm damage the answer is a roofer first, then whoever handles water and power: a plumbing company, an electrical contractor, and where the state licenses it, a restoration firm. Write the list for your house rather than a generic one - a house with a pool, a well, or a generator has an extra trade on it.
2. Pick two companies per trade, not one. The first one will be busy.
3. Check each credential yourself, now. Every state on this site publishes a free lookup, and how to verify a contractor's license walks through all ten. Type the number, not the name.
4. Ask for the certificate of insurance while nobody is under pressure. Several states publish no insurance at all in the license file, so this is a question you put to the company. How to check a contractor's insurance covers the five fields to read on one.
5. Photograph the house before the season, not after the storm. Roof, walls, fences, and the inside of every room. A dated set of before pictures is the least expensive evidence you will ever produce, and it costs nothing but a walk around the house.
6. Read your own policy once, in June. What the deductible is, whether wind and flood sit on the same policy (they usually do not), and what the insurer requires you to do to protect the property after a loss.
7. Save the numbers somewhere that will still exist. On paper, not only in a phone that may be dead.

The rest of this cluster

• After the storm: the first steps - the safety order before anyone climbs anything, and the drying clock.
• Roof damage after a storm - what a tarp does, and how differently the states treat roofing as a trade.
• Hiring a contractor after a storm - the knock at the door, and what each state's record can tell you about it.

When you get to the choosing part, the pages here are already filtered to companies checked against the official register: roofers in Jacksonville, electricians in Miami, roofers in Houston, or the hubs for Florida, Texas, Virginia, New Jersey and Connecticut. How that check is run is on the methodology page, and what it adds to a plain register search is set out in the state lookup comparison.