The Hurricane Prep Your Household Actually Forgets (A Sarasota Checklist)

Every June, the same ritual plays out across Florida: someone in the household says “we should get hurricane stuff,” a trip to Publix happens, and a case of water joins last year’s case of water in the garage.

Water is the easy part. Nobody forgets water.

What households forget — reliably, every season — are the things that don’t fit in a shopping cart. After a decade of Gulf Coast summers, here’s the list that actually matters, roughly in order of how often it gets skipped.

1. Photos of your property — before the storm

Insurance adjusters after a major storm are working through thousands of claims. The households that get paid fastest and fullest are the ones who can show before and after.

Walk your house with your phone. Every room, the roof line, the lanai, the pool cage, inside closets. Ten minutes. Do it in daylight, this week, while there’s nothing on the radar — because once there’s a cone, you’ll be doing forty other things.

2. The insurance policy review — in June, not October

Not “do I have insurance” but three specific questions:

• What’s my hurricane deductible? In Florida it’s usually a percentage of your dwelling coverage, not a flat number. On a $600K house with a 2% hurricane deductible, you’re covering the first $12,000 yourself. Most people discover this after the storm.
• Do I have flood coverage? Homeowners policies don’t cover flood. Storm surge is flood. If you’re anywhere near the coast — and in Sarasota, you are — this is a separate policy with a 30-day waiting period. October is too late to buy it for October’s storm.
• Where is the actual policy? Not “with the agent.” A copy you can open on your phone with the power out.

3. Documents in one waterproof, findable place

Passports, insurance policies, deed or lease, vehicle titles, a list of account numbers, prescriptions, pet vaccination records (shelters require them). The classic failure mode isn’t losing these in the storm — it’s spending the two days before landfall tearing the house apart looking for them.

Physical copies in one waterproof bag. Digital copies somewhere you can reach from anywhere.

4. Your evacuation zone — the actual letter

“We’re pretty far inland” is not a zone. Sarasota County reshuffles zones periodically; the zone you remember from 2022 may not be your zone now. Look it up (scgov.net has the lookup), write the letter down, and note the route you’d actually take — because I-75 North the morning of an evacuation order is its own weather event. Know the decision before the decision.

5. The 72-hour tasks that can’t be done in 72 hours

Some prep only works if it’s done early:

• Generator fuel and propane — the lines form the moment the cone touches Florida. Fill in peace.
• Prescription refills — pharmacies close early and reopen late. Most insurers allow early refills when a storm is named.
• Cash — ATMs empty fast and card readers need power. A few hundred in small bills.
• Gas in both cars — full tanks are the rule from June to November, not a storm-week task.

6. The out-of-state contact

Local cell networks jam after a storm; texts to Atlanta go through when calls across town don’t. Pick one out-of-state person, make sure everyone in the household knows they’re the check-in point, and make sure they know it too.

The real problem isn’t the list

Here’s the thing about every item above: you knew most of them. Florida households don’t fail hurricane prep from ignorance — they fail it from fragmentation. The insurance details live in an email somewhere. The generator was serviced… at some point. The passports are in one of three drawers. The checklist itself gets rebuilt from memory every single June, and every June something falls through.

That’s not a discipline problem. It’s a systems problem — the information exists, it just doesn’t live anywhere that can answer a question.

This is, honestly, why we built the Emergency Prep module in Kaevo. Your checklist persists year to year with your progress. Supplies are tracked with expiration dates — the battery pack that quietly dies in August gets flagged before August. Your evacuation zone, route, and out-of-state contact sit alongside your insurance documents and passports, and when you ask “how’s our hurricane prep?”, you get an actual answer: what’s done, what’s not, what’s expiring.

One question, one honest answer — instead of the annual garage archaeology.

Season runs through November 30. The best week to do all of this is a week exactly like this one, when the radar is quiet.

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