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With An 85% Chance of an Above-Normal Hurricane Season, Now is a Good Time to Make a Plan

The Connecticut coastline has experienced a variety of bad storms and hurricanes over the years. Maybe last time, despite the warnings, you decided to stay. And, maybe it wasn’t so bad.

This is a good year to decide, ahead of time, what you will do if you have to go.

“If you’ve had experience with previous storms and you made it through unscathed, don’t let your guard down,” says Nelson Vaz, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in New York. “Each storm brings different hazards to different areas, and you can’t equate one storm to another. You could get lucky one year and be very unlucky with another storm another year.”

This is a particularly good year to be prepared. A variety of forecasting organizations agree that we could experience an above-normal 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. Forecasters at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United State’s scientific and regulatory agency charged with forecasting weather, are predicting an 85 percent chance of an above normal hurricane season, which runs from the beginning of June through Nov. 30.

The thing is, if you wait until you know whether it’s a bad storm and whether it’s headed right toward you, it could be too late to leave. And so, now is the time to figure out the following for places where you live, work, or might travel through:

where you will get your information (think local officials and a reputable source of weather information like NOAA/NWS)
how to determine whether you are in a flood zone or another hazard zone
where you will go if you do have to go somewhere
what you will do with the pets if you have to go
how you will make sure you have everything you need if you have to go (think checklist)
and how to know when it’s safe to come back.

“One of the most important things is to trust official sources of information,” says Vaz, who has worked as a meteorologist with the National Weather Service since 2003. His territory and expertise include the Connecticut shoreline from New Haven to Old Saybrook.

Being prepared means staying away from alarmist sources on the internet that are mostly interested in logging clicks and instead focusing on reports from forecasters you know to be reputable. That also means knowing who in your town or city is the official source of information during a weather emergency.

“You need to work with your emergency management officials. They will be making decisions and providing those to you to heed them. There is a lot of work and science and communication and collaboration that goes into this. If they’re telling you to evacuate, it’s for a reason. You really should take it really seriously,” says Vaz.

Even though the outlook this year is for a higher-than-normal chance of a bad storm, Vaz says that it would be important to prepare even if the forecast were not quite so dire. “You really need to be prepared every season. It only takes one storm…that can be life-changing, that can be catastrophic. Every season, you have to go into it prepared.”

Most people who live along the Connecticut coast know that storm surge and flooding, in particular, can be deadly. And those of us who live here are potentially faced with a triple threat, coastal storm surge, areas around rivers that can flood, along with urban areas that struggle to handle increasingly heavy rainfall over short periods of time. High winds are another threat. On the Connecticut coast, we have one of the highest concentrations of forested areas next to urbanized areas, which creates an increased threat of down tree limbs on power lines, homes, cars, people.

“We are in an area, unfortunately, that is a high-threat area, it’s a high-risk area,” Vaz says. “That’s why it’s important to know your risk.”

One source for flood risk information is the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) www.fema.gov/flood-maps. Local officials should have additional, more detailed information and should be able to help you interpret that information if it’s confusing.

“Then you should know, where are you going to go? You may have to evacuate to protect your life and your family’s life. Where are you going to go? What are you going to take with you? How are you going to inform loved ones?” Vaz says.

In addition to determining flood hazards, people should have a sense of whether they are in a building that is sturdy enough to handle high winds.

“Where are you going to shelter from high winds? If you are in a sturdy building, you can stay in your home. And, even then, you should be prepared for a power outage. You should also prepare your home. Take care of overhanging limbs, any loose objects, things that need to be tightened up. You should take care of those now.”

You should have a supply kit of at least three days of water, food, medicine, batteries, flashlights, important documents, he says. “Have those available so you can survive two to three days if worse comes to worst before help can get to you.”

To sign up for emergency notifications, visit portal.ct.gov/ctalert. There, you can sign up to have emergency messages sent to phones via voicemail or text message, email addresses, and more.

Vaz says a good source of information during hurricane season is the National Weather Service New York, NY Tropical Page www.weather.gov/okx/tropical. It provides an outlook, threats and impacts, satellite information, radar information, along with links to additional information.

While the NWS and NOAA are already reliable sources of information, those organizations are doing even more to improve reliability and keep up with changes. Specifically, for the 2024 season, they are expanding offerings of Spanish-language products. They are developing an experimental version of a forecast zone graphic that could provide additional information about hazards inland during tropical cyclone events. Two new forecast models will go into operation, one that will provide more information about the role that oceans play in intensifying hurricanes and another that could improve predictions of tropical cyclone rapid intensification. Coastal weather buoys are being upgraded. Saildrones, or uncrewed sailing ocean drones, are being deployed, along with observational underwater gliders and lightweight weather dropsondes that can be released into a storm to provide wind data. More information about those developments can be found at https://research.noaa.gov/?s=hurricane+forecasting.