Evacuating? Lock Down the Waterfront Before You Go

Evacuating changes the math on everything. You’re not preparing a property anymore — you’re spending a fixed, shrinking amount of time on it and then leaving. Some things are worth minutes of that. Some things are worth none of it, no matter how much they’d bother you to lose.

This is the compressed version of the 24-hour checklist: what to do, in what order, and what to deliberately walk away from.

Where evacuation orders actually come from

Evacuation orders come from your county’s emergency management office — Lee, Collier, Charlotte, or Sarasota County, depending on where you live. The National Hurricane Center forecasts the storm and issues watches and warnings. Counties decide who leaves.

Orders are issued by evacuation zone, and two things about zones trip people up every season:

• Your evacuation zone is not your flood insurance zone. Different systems, different purposes. Flood zones are about insurance and building requirements; evacuation zones are about surge vulnerability and who gets told to go.
• Zones are looked up by address, not guessed by neighborhood. Find yours through your county’s emergency management office and write it down somewhere you’ll find it again — ideally in the spring, not while a storm is in the Gulf.

If your zone is called, that’s the decision. Nothing on the rest of this page competes with it.

The order matters more than the list

With limited time, sequence is what separates a useful twenty minutes from a wasted one. Run it in this order.

1. Set your departure time first. Before you touch anything outside, decide when you’re pulling out of the driveway — accounting for your county’s order, traffic on evacuation routes, bridges, and the fact that conditions deteriorate well ahead of a storm’s center. Everything below fits inside that window. If an item doesn’t fit, the item loses, not the window.

2. Photos and documents — five minutes, highest value. Walk out with your phone. Wide shots of the dock, seawall, and yard; closer shots of pilings, decking, the lift, cradle, and motors, and any boathouse or tiki hut. Back them up to the cloud before you leave. Save your policy number and your agent’s or carrier’s contact information to your phone. Coverage varies a great deal between policies, so confirm what yours actually covers with your agent or carrier — don’t assume based on anything you read, including here. More background in what to do about dock storm damage and your insurance claim.

3. Power off at the breaker. Shut off the circuits feeding the boat lift, dock receptacles, dock lighting, fish lights, and any power pedestal — while everything is dry and you can see what you’re doing. Then leave them off. When you get back, they stay off: stay clear of the structure, inspect visually from dry ground only, and have a licensed electrician verify the system before anything is re-energized. Salt water in a lift motor or control box doesn’t announce itself, and an energized dock circuit in flooded water is a lethal hazard.

4. Loose items — inside, not tied down. Furniture, coolers, ladders, kayaks, paddleboards, canvas, fenders, hoses, planters, tools, trash bins. Into the garage or the house. Water moves things that wind can’t, so lashing gear to the dock or stacking it against the seawall isn’t securing it. If you’re short on time, prioritize the heavy and hard items — those are what break things when they move.

5. The boat: finish, don’t start. Whatever plan is already underway, complete it. If nothing is underway, leave the boat. If it’s staying on the lift, set it per your lift manufacturer’s storm guidance for your model and per what you’ve confirmed with your insurer — that decision is rig-specific and isn’t something to improvise while packing.

6. Lock up and go, early. Close the house, take your bag, and leave with more margin than you think you need.

What not to attempt when you’re out of time

This list is as important as the one above, and harder to follow, because each item feels productive.

• Don’t start a haul-out or a run to a protected basin. If it isn’t already in motion, it’s now a trip taken at the worst possible time.
• Don’t take a boat out during a warning, for any reason.
• Don’t get on a boathouse roof or a tiki hut to secure anything. Roof work in rising wind is how people get seriously hurt.
• Don’t pull canopy panels or covers in gusty conditions. A large panel in wind is not controllable, and the job isn’t worth the injury.
• Don’t try to shore up, brace, or sandbag a seawall or dock. Nothing a homeowner can do in an afternoon meaningfully changes how a wall performs against surge, and it puts you at the water’s edge at exactly the wrong time.
• Don’t wait for a contractor. Nobody can safely get to your waterfront in the hours before a storm, and holding your departure for one is a bad trade.
• Don’t stay to protect property. Not for a boat, not for a dock, not for a house. There is nothing to be done during the event.

What to take with you

Almost all of it lives on your phone:

• Pre-storm photos, backed up to the cloud
• Policy number and your agent’s or carrier’s contact information
• Your boat lift’s make, model, and capacity
• Marina, storage, and contractor contacts
• Gate, dock box, and boat keys
• A note of which breakers you shut off and where the panel is

Property is replaceable

We build docks, boat lifts, and seawalls for a living, so we’ll be blunt about this: all of it can be rebuilt. Pilings can be re-driven, decking replaced, walls repaired or replaced, lifts rebuilt or swapped. It’s work, and it takes time, and it’s genuinely painful to look at — but it is a project, not a loss you can’t come back from.

There is exactly one thing on your property that can’t be rebuilt, and it’s you and the people with you. Set your departure time, spend what you can spare on the list above, and go.

When you’re back and officials say the area is open, don’t rush the water — start with the first 48 hours after a storm, which covers the safety order before anyone steps onto a dock. If you already know your structure took damage, we inspect, repair, and rebuild across Southwest Florida with our own crew and write detailed estimates that work for an insurance claim. Start at our dock repair page or call (239) 397-3400 for a free on-site estimate.