Most hurricane checklists tell you to buy water and batteries. Useful, but it's the wrong altitude. The expensive failures in a Palm Beach County home during an outage almost never involve bottled water. They involve gas, refrigeration, plumbing, and air conditioning, and they happen in the kitchen more often than anywhere else in the house.
Here are the four systems worth handling now, in August, while you still have a working phone and a vendor who answers it.
1. Gas and propane
The problem. You evacuate with the gas line still on. A storm shifts the tank, damages a regulator, or cracks a fitting, and now there's a leak in an empty house with nobody there to smell it. Gas leaks in unoccupied homes are one of the few storm failures that can escalate from expensive to catastrophic.
The fix. Find your shutoff valve today, before you need it in the dark. Label it clearly. Turn it off before you leave. Then photograph the label and the valve position and put that photo somewhere your house sitter, your neighbor, or your concierge can find it.
That last step is the one people skip. A shutoff valve nobody else can locate protects you only when you happen to be home, which is precisely when you need it least.
2. Fridge and freezer
The problem. The power goes out and a full freezer becomes several hundred dollars of spoiled food. Worse, as everything thaws, water finds its way onto the floor and under the cabinets. A slow thaw into a cabinet base is the kind of damage you don't discover until the smell starts.
The fix. Turn both units to their coldest setting a full 24 hours before the storm arrives. Freeze water bottles and pack them into the gaps, because a dense freezer holds temperature far longer than an empty one. Then confirm your generator actually covers the kitchen circuit, which is not the same as confirming you own a generator.
Cold before the storm beats cleanup after it, and the prep costs nothing but attention.
3. Water systems
The problem. Storm surge and municipal pressure loss can push contaminated water backward through your supply line. Separately, and more commonly, a supply line under a sink lets go while the house is empty and runs for days. A burst line behind a refrigerator or under a rarely opened cabinet is the single most expensive thing that happens to unoccupied Florida homes, and insurers scrutinize those claims hard.
The fix. Shut the main off if you're leaving for more than a couple of weeks. Before you do, check the supply lines under every sink and behind the fridge for corrosion at the fitting. Braided stainless lines have a service life, and the failure point is almost always the crimped connection at either end, not the hose itself.
If you keep irrigation running while you're away, isolate it so the house side of the system is still shut off.
4. The A/C unit
The problem. Two failures, both compressor deaths. Running the A/C off a generator that can't carry the starting load burns out the compressor. Leaving the unit running through a surge does the same thing. Compressor replacement in Palm Beach County runs into the thousands, and in September you will be waiting behind everyone else who made the same mistake.
The fix. Shut the unit down at the breaker before the outage, not during it. When power returns, bring it back online in the right order: breaker first, then thermostat, with a few minutes in between. Sequencing is what actually protects the compressor, and it's the part almost nobody gets right under stress.
If you're leaving the house empty for the season, don't shut the A/C off entirely. Palm Beach humidity will turn your ductwork and closets into a mold problem by October. Hold it at 77 or 78 with the fan on auto instead.
The pattern underneath all four
Every one of these is cheap to prevent and expensive to discover. Every one takes under an hour. And every one requires a decision made in August rather than a decision made while watching a cone of uncertainty narrow on the news.
The homeowners who move through hurricane season calmly are not luckier than everyone else. They handled this list in July, when the good vendors still had openings on the calendar.
If you'd rather hand it off, that's what a home concierge is for. Private Line Homes members get all four systems handled before the season peaks, with photo confirmation on every step.