Hurricanes and Home Watch
By Jack Luber, Executive Director NHWA 2019
Why snowbirds and part-time residents have a choice in how to protect their Home Away From Home.
Greetings!
June 1st marks the official beginning of Hurricane and Storm Season here on the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, and depending on the severity of previous storms in the area where your second home is located, you may take the potential threat more seriously than others…or not. Speaking from personal experience as a former vacation homeowner here on the coast of South Carolina while I was at home on the New Jersey Shore, I discovered the intense fear and anxiety of being so very far away from my place— while an “act of nature” was headed straight towards it. That fear and anxiety appeared each and every time I heard about the latest named storm, and where the “cone of uncertainty” was. Talk about feeling helpless? Being cut off from reliable information, and feeling all alone because I didn’t have people that I could really trust to look out for my best interests, was terrible. At the time, there were no Home Watch businesses that would prep my place—put away furniture and possible flying projectiles—and then document that it had been done with pictures and a report. And, afterwards, I had to wait to see if I could
get someone over to my place to see if there was any damage. If I needed to get down there, would it even be possible? It was terrible, and I lost a lot of sleep. So I started my business, Coastal Carolina Home Watch and began to offer these services to people like me who kept second homes here in my area. And then the storms seemed to stop coming. There was a period when there were not many major storms on the East Coast or the Gulf of Mexico. As the years went by, and people began to get lulled to sleep because most storms that threatened to be so destructive luckily failed to materialize, It got to the point that people—intelligent people—stopped paying attention like they should have been. Storms named Hugo, Andrew and Katrina all became distant memories. And Super Storm Sandy, the tropical storm that did so much damage to the Northeast? Well, that really didn’t affect the Southern states. So, what was once a huge concern and was never far from people’s minds had, over time, became relegated to something that wasn’t really probable anymore.
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