Preparing for the next storm is far from the point here. the storm is just over a hundred miles off the coast of Florida. the preparations should of never stopped. a soldier doesn't walk on the battlefield without being locked and loaded even if no action is taking place.
If this was a category 1 I wouldn't be too worried even with shutters. but to forget about a storm packing winds over 200 mph right in your area could be the last thing you worry about. a category 1 hurricane is 74 - 95 mph. it's nothing compared to a cat 5. what I drive into people is to pull the shutters out and place them in front of the windows and be ready to install as the storm approaches. start getting everything else ready. plenty of fuel and food. remove things in the yard that can blow away. prepare the bathroom as a safe space if the roof starts coming off, or the wind starts getting in through a door or window failure. it's the toughest part of the house and the safest place to be. a hurricane puts the house through positive and negative wind loads. you can watch a window breath. you can really see this transpire with clear lexan shutters. I never recommend them for large windows or sliding glass windows.
Impact glass has replaced hurricane shutters for the last decade. that's the new homes. we still have a large amount of homes that only have hurricane panels, accordion shutters, or rollup shutters. then you have thousands who have nothing and fail to keep the wood from the previous storms. depending on the amount of windows a house can be hurricane ready in under 10 minutes that have accordion or rollup shutters. hurricane panels are manually installed in different ways and can take hours to install. if you have panels then they should of been in place days ago. my phone hasn't rang all day? Thursday and Friday was a stream of SOS calls and slowly became silent.
Other than the tracking the main thing I watch is the pressure..
August 29 MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...991 MB
September MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...910 MB
The bottom line here is this storm should NOT be taken for granted given the distance away from the coastline.
My point was that people in south Florida should have been preparing for hurricanes for years rather than days.
I have a large number of relatives who live in the mid-west in tornado prone areas. Over the past decade or two, tornado shelters (or "Oklahoma rooms") have grown in popularity even with people who have basements. A few years ago, one family of relatives headed for their basement during a tornado warning. That tornado scored a direct hit on their house. When it was safe to get out of the basement, they discovered that everything above the carpet on the first floor was gone.
I realize that southern Florida homes probably don't generally have basements. But one section of the house, or maybe the garage, could be built with reinforced concrete (top, bottom, sides, and steel doors) and include sleeping, cooking, and bath facilities. It would probably float away in a surf surge before being breached by a hurricane.
Shutter, building "Oklahoma rooms" in south Florida might be a good business opportunity for you. They wouldn't replace "Florida rooms", but their owners would find that they had a lot of new friends during hurricanes.
