Hurricane prep in Miami gets sold as an outdoor job: shutters, patio furniture, the generator. The part that decides how your first week after a storm feels happens inside, and most of it is cleaning. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, and the National Hurricane Center puts the peak at September 10, with most activity between mid-August and mid-October. Miami-Dade County's own guidance is blunter about timing: emergency supplies should be fully stocked by June 1. Here's how a family-run crew based in Coral Gables thinks about the inside of the house before a storm and after the power comes back.
The fridge is a four-hour appliance, the freezer is a two-day one
The numbers change what you should do. The FDA's outage guidance says a refrigerator keeps food cold for about 4 hours if it is unopened, while a full freezer holds its temperature for approximately 48 hours, or 24 hours if it is half full. The common Miami advice to "stock up before the storm" only makes sense for one of them.
We'd argue the opposite for the refrigerator. Eat it down. Every shelf you leave loaded is a shelf you'll be scraping warm dairy off by flashlight. The freezer is where bulk helps: the same FDA page recommends you group food together in the freezer so it stays cold longer and keep appliance thermometers in both compartments. Frozen jugs of water fill the gaps, hold the cold, and become drinking water later.
| Compartment | Safe window with the door closed | What to do the week before |
|---|---|---|
| Refrigerator | About 4 hours | Eat it down, wipe the shelves, leave room to work |
| Freezer, full | About 48 hours | Fill gaps with water jugs, group items tightly |
| Freezer, half full | About 24 hours | Consolidate to one side, add ice or jugs |
Wiping the shelves before the storm isn't fussiness. A fridge emptied warm with a clean interior is a ten-minute wipe afterward. One with old spills under the crisper drawers becomes an odor a Miami August won't let you forget.
The interior room, the bathtub, and the paper
Miami-Dade tells residents to choose an interior room with few or no windows, doors or vents, and to treat a hall closet as a temporary safe room if there's nothing better. In most Miami apartments that closet is currently full. Clearing it is a cleaning task disguised as a safety task: pull the suitcases out, wipe the floor, and leave room for people and a cooler.
Water storage follows the county's math. Their kit list asks for a 7-day supply of water at one gallon per person per day, pets included. Filling a bathtub covers flushing and washing, not drinking, and a tub you'd fill for that purpose should be scrubbed and de-scaled first.
The same Miami-Dade list asks for copies of important documents, plus sanitation and hygiene items like disinfectant wipes, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. Put the documents in a sealed bag on a high shelf, not in a bottom drawer in a ground-level unit.
What to clear and wipe in the last 48 hours
Once a watch or warning is posted for Miami-Dade or Broward, the list gets short. This is one evening's work in a condo or a house:
- Clear every windowsill and the floor below sliding doors. Wind-driven rain finds the track first.
- Run and empty the dishwasher. Your next sink of hot water may be a week away.
- Take every bin out, bathrooms included, and replace liners. Whatever stays will sit through days of heat with no air conditioning.
- Wipe the fridge shelves and set the freezer as cold as it goes. Put refrigerated medicines in a labeled bag at the front so nobody hunts with the door open.
- Charge everything, then unplug what you can and coil cords off the floor.
- Move rugs, floor cushions, and anything upholstered off the floor near doors and low windows.
Notice what's not on that list. No shutters, no roof, no ladders, no yard. Our published exclusions rule out exterior and high-ladder work, and that holds the day before a storm too.
When the power comes back: the order matters
The first hour after the lights return is where kitchens go wrong. The instinct is to open the fridge and start sniffing. The FDA rule is simpler and stricter: discard any refrigerated perishable food that has been above 40°F for 4 hours or more, and refreeze or cook frozen food only if it still contains ice crystals or is at 40°F or below. If you set out thermometers before the storm, this is a reading, not a guess.
Then clean the appliance, not just the food. Empty it fully, pull the drawers and shelves, and wash them in the sink. The FDA's sanitizing ratio for surfaces after an outage is one tablespoon of unscented household bleach per gallon of water. Leave the door open to dry before you restock, and check the freezer's drain hole for meltwater that pooled and went sour.
Anything that got wet is on a different clock. The EPA's guidance is to dry water-damaged areas and items within 24 to 48 hours to prevent mold growth, scrubbing hard surfaces with detergent and water while porous materials like carpet may have to be thrown away. In a Miami September with the air conditioning still off, 48 hours is optimistic. A wet rug should be outside the same day.
One boundary we hold: if you find mold, we don't remediate it. The EPA says a patch under about 10 square feet is something most people can handle themselves, and above that it's a specialist. We'll clean around it, dry the room, and tell you what we saw, and that's where our checklist stops.
Debris goes out the front, not down the drain
Post-storm cleanup inside produces a pile: wet packaging, spoiled food, soaked towels. Miami-Dade asks residents to sweep and bag debris so it doesn't clog storm drains and cause sewage overflows, and to use a broom instead of a hose. Bag spoiled food tightly, and in a building, ask the front desk where the storm pile goes.
The one job worth booking before the peak
Here's the position, and it could be wrong for your household: the single cleaning visit worth scheduling is a deep clean in late July or the first week of August, before the NHC's mid-August ramp begins. If you're reading this with the season already underway, the same visit still pays off before the next system shows up on the map. Not a post-storm cleanup, which you can't schedule because you don't know the date, and not a recurring visit, which doesn't reach the places a storm punishes.
The reason is what's on the deep-clean checklist: inside the oven, inside the fridge, behind reachable appliances, grout and shower glass de-scaled, baseboards and sills hand-wiped, vents and blinds dusted. Every item on that list either has to be clean before an outage or becomes a much bigger job after one. A fridge scrubbed in July is a wipe in September. The details of what a deep clean covers are on the site, and if you live in a building, we coordinate access with the front desk or property manager so it happens while you're at work.
Timing is the other reason. Once a storm is named, everyone in Miami wants the same two days. A few days ahead is plenty for a visit in July. It isn't the week a cone appears on the map.
If you want a number for your home before you decide, the online estimate takes about two minutes, and WhatsApp is the fastest way to reach the team.