Hurricane Pool Prep: A Pool Pro's Storm Playbook

You're between stops with the truck idling, and you check the tracker again. The cone just nudged west, and now the three-day track runs right through your service area. Forty accounts. And you already know what the next 48 hours look like: everyone texts you the same question at the same time — what do I do about my pool? — right when you have the least amount of time to answer forty of them one at a time.

The operators who come out of a storm fine aren't the ones who work the fastest that week. They're the ones who already decided, back in June, exactly what they'd do and in what order. A real hurricane pool prep routine is three short lists: what you touch before the storm, what you tell the customer, and what you charge for afterward. Get those set once and a landfall week stops being chaos and starts being a checklist.

The prep that actually matters (and the myth to skip)

Let's kill the biggest myth first, because half your customers will ask about it: do not drain the pool, and don't drop the water way down. A pool is a giant in-ground catch basin. If groundwater rises during a flood and the pool is empty, the shell can literally float out of the ground — a $40,000 mistake to save a few inches of water that rain was going to refill anyway. Leave it full. If real flooding is in the forecast, take it a foot below the skimmer, no more. A full pool is heavy, and heavy is what keeps it put.

What actually protects the water is chemistry you set ahead of the storm, because you might not get back for four or five days:

• Balance and shock the day before. Get chlorine to the high end of normal and make sure pH and alkalinity are in range. You're building a buffer to ride out days of no service, heavy rain dilution, and a pile of organic debris.
• Don't add algaecide as insurance. It won't out-run three days of leaves and warm, stagnant water. Your free chlorine reserve does the real work.
• Note the equipment settings so you or a helper can restart it correctly later.

Two minutes of chemistry now saves you a green-pool recovery later. That's the whole trade.

Kill the power at the right moment — not too early

Your instinct is to shut everything down the night before. Resist it. Leave the pump and filter circulating until the last safe moment, because moving water distributes that chlorine you just added and keeps debris off the floor. When flooding actually threatens the equipment pad, then you cut power at the breaker — not at the timer, at the breaker — so a surge or a submerged motor doesn't fry the panel.

One thing operators get wrong: don't wrap the pump motor in a trash bag "to keep it dry." Trapped condensation does more damage than blowing rain ever would. If the pad is going to flood, power off and let it breathe. If it's just wind and rain, leave it running.

The projectile walk-through

Wind doesn't ruin pools. The stuff around the pool ruins pools. Do a two-minute projectile walk on every prep stop and move or sink anything that can fly:

• Patio chairs, side tables, umbrellas, and umbrella stands
• Pool toys, floats, the skimmer net, loose skimmer and pump-basket lids
• Solar covers and reels — a loose cover becomes a sail

Light stuff goes in the pool or a shed. It's counterintuitive to toss a chair in the water, but a chair on the bottom isn't going through a sliding-glass door at 90 mph. You're not cleaning here; you're removing ammunition.

The message that saves your week

Here's where most of your time actually goes during a storm week: answering the same three questions forty separate times. So don't. Write the message once, before the season, and send it as a batch the moment a storm enters the cone:

Storm's in the forecast for us. Your pool is prepped and balanced to ride it out — no action needed on your end. Please bring in loose patio furniture and toys. I'll be back around as soon as it's safe, and I'll text before any storm-cleanup visit so you can approve it. Stay safe.

That one text sets expectations, tells them what to do, and — critically — warns them that cleanup is a separate, approved visit. Send it to the whole affected route in one shot and your phone stops melting.

After: the cleanup, and how to actually get paid for it

This is the part that quietly costs operators the most money. A storm-hit pool is not a regular stop. It's a two-to-four-hour recovery job — heavy debris removal, a filter clean, a shock, sometimes a full green-to-clean. If you fold that into your normal service rate because you didn't want to seem opportunistic, you just donated a half-day of labor and a bag of chemicals to a customer who fully expected to pay for storm work.

Handle it like the separate job it is:

1. Text before you go. "Your pool took on a lot of debris. Storm recovery runs a flat $[X] and I can be there tomorrow — okay to proceed?" Almost everyone says yes.
2. Shoot before photos. Debris, water color, the whole surface. It ends any "was it really that bad" conversation before it starts.
3. Charge a flat storm-recovery rate, usually $150–$400 depending on debris load and whether the water turned. Flat beats hourly here — the customer knows the number, and you're not nickel-and-diming a stressed-out homeowner.
4. Log it as its own service record so it's not tangled up with the regular visit on the invoice.

Build the list before the sky turns

None of this is hard. What's hard is doing it for forty accounts from memory, in the rain, while your phone won't stop buzzing. The fix is having your storm route, your prep steps, and your batch message ready to fire before the cone ever finds you.

This is where a tool like PoolPros Smart CRM earns a little of its keep — a saved storm route, before/after photos on the service record, and a one-tap batch text to the affected customers beat trying to run it all out of your head. But be honest with yourself: the routine matters far more than the tool. A legal pad with your storm sequence and a group text gets you 90% of the way there, as long as you actually run the play. Decide the play now, in the calm, so the storm is just you working a checklist you already trust.