For parts of the United States, hurricane preparedness might just as well join death and taxes as one of those inescapable burdens. The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30, with most of the action occurring in August through October, and especially in early to mid September.
The Northeast Pacific hurricane season starts and ends a couple of weeks earlier, with late August and early September experiencing the greatest number of storms.
If you live in hurricane country, you probably already know how important it is to practice hurricane preparedness. And if you are still just a few steps short of having prepared a plan, let me suggest that you consider using your garage as a kind of hub for hurricane safety efforts.
One thing that hurricane preparedness efforts offer is time. Unlike tornadoes, for example, hurricanes tend to take a lot of time developing, and tracking systems have become very good predictors of when and where a hurricane will hit.
Here are three reasonably simple steps toward hurricane preparedness that can help you make the best use of the time before a hurricane starts knocking on your front door.
Step One for Hurricane Preparedness: Clear the Yard
One of your first chores should be to completely clean up the yard. One of the biggest dangers posed by high winds is the stuff sitting in the yard. Even a modest hurricane can pick up tables, chairs, kids’ play things, garden tools, flower pots and other items and hurl them at dangerous speeds toward houses and cars.
Step Two for Hurricane Preparedness: Maximize Garage Storage
Clearing your yard is usually a pretty easy task if you have a safe, temporary storage facility. For most of us, the garage is the most likely candidate. Even heavy items like picnic tables can usually be slid into a garage without too much effort.
The key is to make sure the garage can hold everything it will need to hold without having to spend long hours “decluttering.” Here, having an organized garage starts to look less like a nice convenience and more like an important component of household safety and hurricane preparedness. If you have a nice storage system in place before hurricane season arrives, with most regular items up on shelves rather than sitting on the floor, you will have a lot of floor space available for emergency duty.
You can get a head start on organizing the garage with these 9 Steps to a Well-Organized Garage.
Step Three for Hurricane Preparedness: Strengthen the Garage Door
The next step is to make sure that your garage itself is as secure as it can be. And that effort usually begins with the garage door. The fact is that standard garage doors, especially doublewide doors, don’t hold up well against strong winds.
There are two basic approaches to making sure you have a strong garage door. The first is to add bracing to the existing door. The National Hurricane Center offers some good advice on how best to do that. A good source of information on retrofitting existing garage doors is Secure Door.
The other approach is to replace the existing door with a new, hurricane-resistant garage door. Contact a few local garage door professionals for recommendations and prices.
Once you are satisfied with the strength of your garage door, make it a habit periodically to perform a Garage Door Safety Inspection and follow these Simple Garage Door Maintenance Tips.
With hurricane preparedness done in advance, you can ride out a storm worrying about the safety of your family rather than all of the uncompleted items on your To Do list.
Photo © flickr/Creative Commons
