Courtesy of iii.org
Its 2017 and another hurricane season is about to be breathing down our necks. Maybe youve grown immune or indifferent after seasons of weather threats proved wrong. A word of advice: Never let your guard down.
Did recent reminders of the need for storm vigilance get your attention in 2016? Hurricane Hermine and Hurricane Matthew hit Florida last fall. If neither storm affected you, it might be easy to ignore them. The weather is wild and, despite all the scientific tools available, its hard to predict where the winds will go and how powerful they will be.
What you dont know about preparing for bad weather can hurt you. For example, did you know that Hurricane Matthew last October blew up to be a Category 5 hurricane within a 24-hour time frame? If you are surprised, so were weather experts; they said no other storm had intensified that quickly. Read the report about Matthew defying weather forecast models, and then thank our lucky stars that it landed as a Category 1.
What if you prepared for a Category 1 (wind speed up to 95 miles an hour), but a Cat 5 with winds of 165 mph arrived instead? We dont like to think about it, but thinking on it and acting on it in advance is storm-defying behavior. Its time to review our Hurricane Season Insurance Checklist.
You may also like to up your awareness for the upcoming season by listening in to a couple of hurricane season awareness webinars from the National Hurricane Center. The NHC will be talking about new capabilities to issue advisories and warnings and also has a topic on inland flooding, which is an overlooked, yet deadly, threat.
