There is a specific feeling that comes from bracing for one hurricane while you are still cleaning up after the last one. Helene had barely finished knocking my power out for eight hours and my internet out for twelve when Milton started spinning up in the Gulf with Pinellas County in its sights. The debris from the first storm was still in the yard. The forecast for the second was already grim.
Two storms inside two weeks does something useful, even if it is unpleasant. It strips away any illusion that preparation is a one-time chore you finish and forget. Helene had just shown me exactly where my gaps were, and Milton was going to test whether I had closed them. So I ran the whole checklist again, tighter this time, with the lessons of the first storm fresh enough to sting.
What did the first storm teach me before the second one arrived?
Helene was a wake-up call, not a catastrophe, and a wake-up call is the most valuable kind of disaster because it corrects you at low cost. The eight-hour power outage and the twelve hours without internet were survivable, but they disrupted my workflow badly enough to show me which of my backup systems held and which ones I had only assumed would hold.
The mobile hotspot held. When the wired connection died, I turned my mobile account into a hotspot and it carried my laptop and tablet through, faster than I expected and reliable enough to keep working. That was the system that saved the first storm, and it went straight to the top of my Milton list because I now had proof it worked, not a hope that it would.
What Helene exposed was how much a modern working life depends on a single fragile utility. Lose the internet and you lose cloud storage, video calls, scheduling, communication, and most of the tools a business runs on, all at once. The fix is not to depend less on those tools. It is to build a second path to them, so that when the first path floods out, the work keeps moving.
How do you prepare for a Category 3 hurricane?
Milton was forecast to reach Category 3 and possibly worse if it held its track, which meant preparing for the serious end of the scale, not the nuisance end. My preparation came down to a handful of categories, each one a lesson paid for in an earlier storm.
Food and water first. I stocked enough non-perishable food to last several weeks in case stores closed or supply chains broke down, and I laid in plenty of bottled water for drinking plus large containers for cleaning and everything else water is needed for. A storm can cut a region off for longer than anyone expects, and the time to buy supplies is not the day the shelves are already empty.
Cold storage next. My freezer went packed full of ice, both to keep food safe if the power dropped again and to have a reserve of cold on hand. I picked up an ice chest for anything that needed to stay extra cold. After Helene’s eight-hour outage, I knew a longer one from a stronger storm was entirely possible, and a freezer full of ice buys you time.
Fuel and a go-bag after that. The car got a full tank of gas, because gas stations without power cannot pump and the lines at the ones that can stretch for hours. And the go-bag stayed ready by the door, stocked with the essentials: important documents, medication, a first-aid kit, the things you grab in ninety seconds if you have to leave and cannot come back. Having survived Hurricane Irma in 2017, I learned that being able to move fast, without stopping to think about what to bring, is worth more than almost any single supply.
The through-line in all of it is that being proactive instead of reactive makes the whole difference. Peace of mind during a storm does not come from the storm being gentle. It comes from knowing you did everything you could before it arrived. That knowledge is what lets you sleep, or at least rest, while the wind is screaming outside.
Why protect your work before the storm, not after?
The physical preparation is only half of it. The other half is protecting the work itself, and that has to happen before the power goes, because after it goes you have nothing left to work with.
I backed up my entire computer system to the cloud, twice, so that no matter what Milton did to the hardware, the data would survive untouched somewhere safe. The rule I live by is that if your data does not exist in three places, it does not exist at all, and a storm is precisely the moment that rule earns its keep. Hardware can be replaced with a purchase. Years of files cannot be replaced at any price, so they get protected first.
The book on this: Real World Survival is my field guide to disaster preparedness, written from living through hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes.
I also front-loaded the work. Knowing I might lose power and internet for days, I put in extra hours before landfall to get ahead on client projects, and I wrote and scheduled a month of content in advance so my presence online would not vanish the moment I went dark. That way the storm could take my electricity without taking my business with it. When a hurricane is bearing down, the goal is to arrange things so that going offline costs you as little as possible, and the only way to do that is to do the work before the lights go out.
Don’t forget the ones who can’t prepare themselves
In all the checklist-running, it is easy to overlook the members of the household who cannot prepare for a disaster on their own. My cat cannot pack a go-bag or fill a water container. That responsibility falls entirely to me, and it belongs on the list right alongside the food and the fuel.
So I set up a crate by the door with enough food, water, and litter to last for weeks, and I put together a small space in the closet with bedding and a few familiar things to keep him calm. I kept a list of pet-friendly shelters and hotels in case we had to evacuate, because finding out where you can take an animal in the middle of an evacuation is far too late. Anyone who depends on you, two-legged or four, has to be part of the plan from the start, not an afterthought once the wind picks up.
All of this, the storm history and the hard-won checklist and the philosophy underneath it, is what I put into Real World Survival, a book about getting ready for the bad day without letting the fear of it run your life. You can find it and the rest of the preparedness writing on the Prepared, Not Paranoid hub. Milton was still out over the water when I finished getting ready. Whatever it brought, I had done the work, and that is the only part of a storm you control.
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