Preparing for hurricane season is crucial for homeowners and business owners residing in areas prone to hurricanes. These extreme storms are among the most dangerous and destructive natural disasters globally, bringing gale-force winds and relentless flooding that can claim lives and devastate properties in an instant.
However, it’s not all bad news. While no level of preparation can eliminate the risks associated with experiencing a hurricane, there are still many ways to help keep your family and property as safe and secure as possible.
At New London Electric, we recognize the perilous nature of hurricanes and aim to ensure you have all the necessary tools and information to keep you, your loved ones, and your property safe while maintaining power.
Whether you’re getting ready for an impending hurricane or simply want to learn how to prepare for future storms, here is our comprehensive guide to preparing for hurricane season.
Storm and Hurricane Season Preparation Tips
No matter how many times you’ve experienced hurricanes, preparing for one can be a daunting and stressful task. From boarding up windows and securing your electrical systems to stocking up on food, water, and other emergency supplies, there’s a lot to worry about, often with very little time to prepare.
When it comes to hurricane preparedness for businesses and homes, the best piece of advice we can offer is to be proactive. Don’t wait until a storm is about to hit to start your preparations. Use all the time available outside of hurricane season to ensure you’re always ready whenever disaster may strike.
If you live in an area prone to hurricanes and want to ensure that you and your property are ready for the worst, follow these essential storm preparation tips.
Stock Up on Emergency Supplies
The first step in preparing for hurricane season is to stock up on emergency supplies. However, this can be a significant challenge in the days and hours leading up to a hurricane. Empty shelves are a common sight before a hurricane strikes, and, likely, your local grocery store or pharmacy won’t reopen until long after the storm passes.
The good news is that you can begin gathering emergency supplies well before a hurricane approaches. Whether it’s keeping a basic first aid kit, refilling your prescriptions for essential medications, or gradually collecting non-perishable canned goods throughout the year, these actions can help ensure that you have what you need before store shelves run empty.
Water is also critically important, especially in survival situations. While people can go without food for days or even weeks, it only takes a few days without water for someone to perish. Ideally, you should store one gallon of water per person per day to ensure that everyone has enough during a hurricane.
Lastly, power outages during hurricanes are almost inevitable, so be sure to have a sufficient supply of flashlights and extra batteries to power them.
Store Important Documents
Hurricanes don’t just cause damage to properties; they can also ruin or destroy everything inside them, including your essential documents. Social security cards, birth certificates, tax documents, and business records are challenging, if not impossible, to replace. Therefore, you should make plenty of copies and store them in waterproof bags or containers to ensure they remain safe.
The same applies to digital documents, particularly for business owners. Computers don’t handle water and lightning very well, so ensure you backup all your essential business documents and customer information to external hard drives and cloud storage while you still have the chance.
Come Up With an Emergency Communication Plan
Another crucial step in hurricane season preparation is to develop an effective emergency communication plan. Communication can be the difference between life and death during any disaster, so maintaining transparent and open communication channels is crucial.
While we often take our cell phones for granted, cell service is frequently unavailable during and after a hurricane. This means that you’ll have to come up with other ways that don’t rely on cell service to communicate.
Satellite phones and walkie-talkies are the most effective solutions to this problem, providing instant communication with family members when other methods fail. That being said, even these devices rely on some sort of electricity, so you’ll need to ensure that you have enough battery power to keep these channels open.
If all else fails, plan a local meeting point where you and your family can gather if you suddenly need to evacuate or get separated. This ensures that even if you can’t communicate at all, everyone in your group will know exactly where to meet to gather together again and weather the rest of the storm.
Know Local Evacuation Routes and Storm Shelters
Sometimes, taking shelter in your home or business simply isn’t an option. Even if your property starts as a safe place to seek refuge, the situation during a hurricane can change in an instant. This is why it’s also essential to have a backup plan.
State and local governments invest significant effort and resources into planning, designing, and designating emergency evacuation routes and storm shelters, and you should take advantage of this.
Always ensure you know all the local evacuation routes so that you can escape even if the one nearest to your property is blocked. In the worst-case scenario, if your property becomes unsafe and it’s too late to evacuate, knowing how to reach your local designated storm shelter will make the difference between outlasting the storm or not.
Secure Your Home or Business
Property damage is often inevitable during a hurricane, but there are plenty of things that you can do to limit the amount of damage your home or business sustains.
The first step to securing any property is to protect your windows. You can do this by either installing storm shutters long before the hurricane makes landfall or by boarding them up with plywood if you’re in a hurry. Regardless of which you choose, this will help ensure that your windows don’t break while also providing one less entry point for water to get into your home or business.
Another great way to limit damage from flooding is to use sandbags. While they may be hard to come by, especially right before a hurricane, sandbags can act as a solid barrier that redirects flood waters away from your home or business. This isn’t a perfect solution, and there is a chance that some water will seep through. Still, by placing sandbag barriers in front of doorways and around foundations, you can significantly reduce the risk of flooding to your property.
Trees also pose a significant threat to your property, as all it takes is one loose branch to fall and cave in your property’s roof. While you shouldn’t go chopping down every tree in the general vicinity of your property, trimming overgrown branches and cutting down dead trees can go a long way to helping your property stay safe during a storm.
Unplug Electrical Appliances
Electrical appliances are also at significant risk of damage during hurricanes and even less severe thunderstorms. At the same time, a power outage is unlikely to harm electrical appliances, but electrical surges that occur when power is restored can cause damage. Even if the rest of your property remains unscathed, a sudden power surge can completely fry electrical appliances or even trigger an electrical fire that exponentially increases property damage. Simply turning these appliances off isn’t sufficient. As long as they are connected to the electrical systems in your home or business, they remain vulnerable to damage from electrical surges. This means you should always unplug all electrical appliances on your property, including computers, TVs, gaming systems, sound systems, kitchen appliances, and other similar devices.
Turn Off All Power to Your Home or Business
Similarly, it’s a good idea to turn off your property’s power completely, especially if you anticipate flooding in your home or business. Everyone knows that water and electricity don’t mix, and if water enters your property, the conditions inside could shift from completely safe to extremely dangerous in an instant.
Sometimes it doesn’t even take severe flooding. Even a small leak in your roof could allow enough water inside to cause significant damage and electrical hazards.
While you shouldn’t worry about shutting down the power as soon as it starts storming, if water begins to enter your home or you need to evacuate entirely, you should turn off the main switch and circuit breakers immediately to prevent any additional harm to people and your property.
Install a Backup Power Generator
When a hurricane strikes, power outages are almost always a given, but they don’t have to be that way. As long as there is no significant flooding around your property, all it takes is the right backup generator, and you’ll be able to keep your home or business running like normal.
Both home and business owners can greatly benefit from installing a backup generator for several reasons. Not only does keeping the power on keep you safer and more comfortable inside your property, it also makes almost everything else you have to worry about during a hurricane a lot easier to deal with.
With uninterrupted power, you won’t have to worry about the food in your fridge going bad, HVAC systems shutting down, lights going out at night, or your essential communication tools like phones, walkie-talkies, and radios running out of battery, but that’s not nearly all.
For business owners specifically, a backup generator can be the safety net they need to keep customer data secure, prevent unsold inventory from spoiling, and ensure that security systems remain operational.
Whether it’s comfort and convenience or safety and security, installing a backup power generator for your home or business is the best way to ensure that you have the electricity you need during hurricanes and other severe weather events.
Contact New London Electric Today
Do you want to learn more about preparing your home or business for hurricane season? Are you thinking about installing a backup electric generator to help you weather the storm? Either way, give New London Electric a call.
Here at New London Electric, we’re proud to be the most trusted electrical experts in southeastern Pennsylvania. We specialize in helping both home and business owners obtain the backup generators they need, and we are happy to offer additional hurricane safety tips to ensure your safety.
All you need to do is call, and our team of backup generator experts will take the time to get to know you and your specific electrical needs, so we can help you find the perfect electrical generator for your current situation.
Hurricanes and severe storms can be terrifying and dangerous, but with a backup generator from New London Electric, you can ensure that you are always prepared for the worst. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Contact New London Electric and get the new backup generator your home or business needs today!
