Matt Lanza

Everybody that lives in a hurricane prone area should be prepared with a kit

You can go online, go to your local municipal emergency management agency, county, state, local, whatever.

They will always have a hurricane checklist.

What do you need to do ahead of a hurricane?

And it'll tell you.

I mean, it will lay it out for you what you should have, what should be in your kit.

What do you need to think about?

I always tell people, you know, aside from all that, pay really close attention to, you know, if you have pets, what are you going to do with the pets if you have to evacuate?

If you have to evacuate and you've got to make a really quick move, you know, this can go just beyond hurricanes, this can go to like wildfires and other catastrophes as well.

What are you going to do about childcare?

What do you do if your partner's at work?

How are you going to do this stuff?

What route are you going to take to get out?

All these different things.

You should be mapping all this out ahead of the season so that when the trigger gets pulled and it's time to do things, you've already got that plan drafted and ready to go and you know what you have to do.

I think when I first moved to Texas, one of the things I did was I mapped out an evacuation route from my house to my home.

Dallas, but it was like on all county roads.

Because I had heard the horror stories during Rita of, you know, more people died during Hurricane Rita in the evacuation of Houston than in the actual storm.

Because it was just a mass exodus.

Nobody was prepared for it.