How to Prepare for a Category 5 Hurricane

10/9/2024

Catherine Antenucci is a born-and-raised New Yorker who has found a home in South Florida. She hears about how many natives hear about impending hurricanes and either decide to ride out the storms or underestimate their potential strength. 

When combining her background and her job as the assistant director of engineering at the Fort Lauderdale Marriott Harbor Beach Resort & Spa, Antenucci is not in the position to underestimate any storm of any level, much less one packing the potential punch of Hurricane Milton, which ramped up to Category 5 status over the Gulf of Mexico at an alarmingly fast rate earlier this week. 

Milton is poised to strike the west coast of Florida and is projected to wreak havoc on a state that only earlier this month took the initial brunt of Hurricane Helene, which continued into the Appalachian Mountains area and dropped unprecedented flooding and destruction on North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, resulting in hundreds of deaths. 

“I’ve always lived by ‘Be overprepared than underprepared,’” says Antenucci, who has been with the Marriott property for four years. “You can live your whole life in Florida and maybe not have a direct hit but at this working property, I’m not going to be the one to take that chance.” 

Hurricane season in Florida runs from June to November, and the season always brings a level of nervousness for Antenucci, who also worked a year at Renaissance Orlando at SeaWorld before moving to the Fort Lauderdale property.  

“We’re looking at how Helene hit the west coast (of Florida), and it wasn’t necessarily the wind or the rain, it was the storm surge that got a lot of the damage,” she says. “That's just one of the things that can come with a hurricane.” 

In addition to the hurricane, Antenucci, also a 2024 Facility Champion, is also in the middle of a renovation at the beachside 800,000 square foot resort that has 650 rooms and conference space. She spoke with FacilitiesNet about some of the challenges associated with preparing a resort for a potentially record-setting storm while accommodating guests and staff that must stay on property during the hurricane. 

FN: What are you doing as a facilities staff when you are in the path of a looming hurricane? 

Antenucci: The biggest thing, though there are a few to start with, is coordinating with all the other departments. We, as well as security, kind of lead the way to make sure the property is prepped. They do a checklist to make sure that the other departments, especially the outside ones, secure their outside furniture if they’re not bringing it in to make sure that it doesn’t become any sort of projectile. Umbrellas are usually closed at 25 miles per hour winds, so they’re brought in. Then we make sure the building is prepared. Security helps with making sure that nothing outside can be used to hurt the building, so that takes a lot off our plate. We prep the entire inside. One different thing, at least for me, is going through renovations, so there’s a lot more vulnerable places that we weren’t exposed to the last time. We’re coordinating with contractors to make sure they’re covering up any holes that they’ve done on any work in progress, so that nothing can be used for water penetration. We got early rain this weekend, so it’s highlighting some of the areas that they can prepare for. Unfortunately, some rain got through the leaks. I’m not going to say it’s inevitable, but if any property survives a storm without any leaks, I would be more than surprised. 

FN: How far in advance are you looking to prepare for a hurricane? 

Antenucci: We’re kind of prepped for hurricanes all season long. At the very beginning of the season, we do our biggest prep that’s going to take the most time, or the most important stuff. At the beginning of the season, I’ll make sure all our generator tanks are topped off so at least at the start of the season we have full tanks. We didn’t have to use any of our generators for any previous storms, so knock on wood regarding power.  

FN: How do you accommodate guests during a hurricane event? 

Antenucci: We have guests here year-round and even during storms. We have a group here now that a lot of them can’t leave on time, so they’ve extended their stay, and we have to be more than accommodating to our guests, even if that means not putting up barricades for fire safety, but putting up some stanchions to recommend no one go outside during high wind days. Based on the weather, we’ll start removing amenities from the outside so if it gets too windy or there’s lightning, we’ll shut the pool down. Everything goes in phases. Each department has its own checklist. But we prepare the guests and let them know to let us know if they need anything. We try to accommodate them the best we can. If we do lose power, we have kits that we give to each guest. It’s a flashlight, extra batteries and a glow stick. We have extra bottles of water in the rooms, and we have our own hurricane room where we have extra water, disposable plates and more garbage bags. We have a lot of boots, but that’s for the associates if we need to remediate anything. And luckily, we’re on the beach, so we have an endless supply of sandbags. We have quite a few prepared and ready to go on a pallet. If it’s going to be a direct hit hurricane, upper management and the general manager would make the call if we need to board anything up. Our landscape teams will walk the roof to make sure there’s nothing that can clog up our roof drains so that we can prevent any flooding of our roofs. With construction going on our roofs, it’s inevitable having garbage up there, so we walk that as often as we can. We also make sure that all our landscaping tools are ready to go, like our chainsaws and trimmers. 

Dave Lubach is executive editor of the facility market.