How can we better prepare our homes for hurricanes and severe storms?

Whether you live on the coast fulltime, own a vacation home or are considering a move to the coast, you know that there is an annual risk from hurricanes for homeowners, particularly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.
Our guest today is George Siegal, a filmmaker and podcaster, who directed the documentary "The Last House Standing." He says knowledge is power when it comes to protecting your home. Listen to understand the questions you need to ask when talking to your realtor or contractor about preparing your house. 
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About the Across the Sky podcast
The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team:
Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia.
Episode transcript
Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically:
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Across the Sky podcast brought to you by Lee Enterprises. I’m meteorologist Joe Martucci. I am here with meteorologist Sean Sublette, meteorologist Matt Holiner. Kirsten Lang is not here today as we talk about hurricane preparedness in your house, we are going to use the heat of hurricane season really starts to ramp up in August, the peak of about ten stands and interest will drop through mid-October.
So I think we're in a second quarter of hurricane season here. But as we get into the peak, we have George Siegal  here to talk to us about it. He does a lot of work in home preparedness year. We think it's very valuable as we go into the season, especially for those of you who are living on the East Coast or on the Gulf Coast.
I have a second house there. So let's hop on into it and we'll talk to George Siegal  on the Across the Sky podcast. Okay. We are here with George Siegal . George is currently in the Tampa area in Florida. He is a filmmaker, a podcaster and a former local news reporter. And Weather Castor will talk about that as well.
But we really have him on today to talk about hurricane preparedness in relation to owning a home. You know, as we get into August and September and October, especially if you live in Florida or if you live on the coast, you're thinking about hurricane season, what you need to do to prepare yourself now and what you need to do when we do get into those hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings.
George also directed the documentary The Last House Standing has a podcast as well. So we welcome John George to our Across the Sky podcast. Thanks so much for joining us here today to talk about hurricane.
Hey, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.
Yeah, you're very welcome. So, you know, first I want to talk a little bit about your weather career here. First, what got you interested in weather and where across the country have you been forecasting a lot?
You know, probably easier to tell you where I haven't been. You know, it just it was a fluke how I ended up doing it. I used to I grew up watching Pat Sajak when he was a weatherman in Southern California, and I went to audition for a job in Bakersfield for a sports job. And the guy said, Oh, can you do weather?
We have an opening for a weather guy. I said, Sure, I can do weather. And I didn't know anything about weather, but I was good at talking. And so I got the job and, you know, I did it for the next 14 years. Couldn't get away from that job. You know, I never I wasn't a meteorologist. I learned how to do, you know, read the maps and do forecasting.
I was doing it more for entertainment value. But it was it was a lot of fun. You got to meet a lot of interesting people. I've worked with some really talented people at different stations around the country. I worked from San Francisco to Seattle. I started in Bakersfield, went to Fresno, Detroit and San Antonio. So I got to live some fun places.
And it was it was a good experience.
So, you know, you said, you know, entertainment of, you know, couple of seconds to go there. But now you're really working on, you know, more serious topics, right?
So now that you get closer to hurricane season, it's more about what can I do now to be prepared? Absolutely. Make check your insurance policy. Make sure that you have the coverage that you think you have. Have somebody explain it to you. You know, the insurance policy is 50, 60 pages long. Sometimes most people read the first page where their name is and they sign something.
And so you really need to understand it is are there exclusions for storms? But most insurance policies aren't going to cover flooding at all. And if you need to get an inch flood insurance policy, it takes 30 days for that to go into effect. So when you look at the hurricane maps now and you see something cooking in the tropics and you go, that could be ten days away, that could be 15 days away, you're not going to have flood insurance for that.
So then you have to go, okay, well, what are the things I can do right now? Take pictures of everything in your house and document it so you know what you have.
Yeah. I'm curious about when you get into this short time span. I mean, within a week and you're in the cone. And of course, there's still uncertainty where the worse impact everybody you know, for people in Florida, anywhere in the US East Coast, once you're in the cone and you're down to a week before a potential landfall, what should people really focus on?
Because there's so many things suddenly that you feel like you have to do, but what are the most important things people should do now to prepare their home for a potential hurricane or tropical storm making landfall?
Well, first of all, you really have to know how your home is built to withstand something like that. So, for example, you know, we were talking before we went on about Saint Petersburg. A lot of Saint Pete would be underwater in a major storm. So you have to know what is the flooding potential for where you live, whether you even want to stay there, if you've ever seen those videos of people getting rescued off the roof of their house or I have a guy I interviewed for my podcast who was in Tin City, which is down in Naples, and they had 20 homes in their community and they all flooded during it.
And he evacuated. One of his neighbors did not. And she was killed in the hurricane. She drowned. And it's just frightening to see those things. So you really have to know where I'm living. What is the risk here? And then you have to know when to go in Florida because it's a peninsula. If you wait too long, you could be sitting on the highway when the storm is hitting.
The gas could all be out between here and wherever you're going. So you have to know when to leave and you have to know what you're leaving behind. And how safe is your house going to be there. It's like, you know, are people going to break in and steal everything you have? What if your roof is leaking and you have to stop it from leaking?
But the commitment has to be to protect your life and your family first. That has to be the number one thing. And when the experts tell you to go, I mean, as critical as I can be of weather forecast, I think those guys do a phenomenal job and I think first responders do a terrific job. But when you stay behind and are caught in a storm and they have to come get you, now, you're risking their life.
So it's a whole level of responsibility. But the main thing is understanding what what you think your house will do in a storm, what your neighborhood will do, what's the flood potential like? We did something in our house. We have a double front door with I have a newer house, but those double front doors are pretty worthless if it's really strong wind because they'll just blow right in.
So what I did is I bought a Kevlar blanket that's made where they screw it in around the frame of the door, and you could try to shoot a cannon through that and it wouldn't open. So I know my front door is safe. I know we're at ten feet elevation. So when Ian was coming, we were told it's going to be higher than ten feet.
And, you know, that was a really scary time. And I just wanted to go back to the forecasting thing. I don't want to keep beating on that, but the forecasters had everybody here so scared, okay, this is going to be bad. This is the worst case scenario, blah, blah, blah. And then when the storm turned, they all acted like, well, they usually turn when they approach Florida like that.
And it's the news media mentality of they always give themselves attaboys even when they're wrong. I my boss used to say, don't ever tell him to tell people. Tell people why the forecast was wrong. Don't talk about it. So when it would rain on that picnic on Saturday, on Monday, the anchors would go, George, you nailed another one.
That was great. And I used to go crazy. I go, People aren't stupid. The people that just got poured on at that festival hate me at this time. Why don't I go on the air and explain what happened? Why don't I explain the convergence zone shifted or this storm developed quickly, You know, tell them why. And we weren't allowed to do that.
So you see a lot of patting on the back and the most accurate forecast, even when it's wrong.
I think in recent years that that mentality has shifted. I feel like with the advent of just democratization of news, that you need to kind of be honest with yourself because people will, like you said, they'll realize that the forecast is wrong. You go somewhere else. It is really interesting by Ian. No, I mean because, you know, to your point, right, it did look like, you know, Tampa, Clearwater, St Petersburg was ground zero.
But as we know, Fort Myers was still always at a risk or it just wasn't in the center of the cone like you saw. So what are your ideas about, you know, making sure when you're talking about a hurricane forecast cone that we could say, you know, in the case of Ian, hey, look, if you're in Fort Myers, you still got to pay attention to this, even though Tampa is Saint Petersburg.
Clearwater was, you know, three, four days out looking to be you know, they were in the center of the cone, but that didn't mean that they were doing to thoroughly, you know, the worst case scenario for it either.
You know, that all boils down to how people don't think anything bad is going to happen to them. We all we you know, every year we see when and whenever a hurricane is headed towards New Orleans, all the people partying on Bourbon Street, you see the people that put up signs saying it's not going to affect me, the storm's not going to hurt us.
I think people just live with that. So when you're in the corner of the cone, you have this false sense of security. And those people absolutely should have been preparing. But then places like Sanibel Island and Captiva, there's one way off of that island. So if you think you need to get out, you don't wait till the last minute or you're not getting out.
And we saw how bad Sanibel and Captiva were damage. We used to go down there every year and it's heartbreaking.
All right. Well, we have George Siegal  here on the Across Sky podcast. We're going to take a brief break and the other side will have more. Welcome back to the Across the Sky podcast. Ah, Lee Enterprises National Weather Podcast. New episodes come out every Monday. Wherever you get your podcasts, we are joined with George Siegal  again here. We're talking about homeownership, hurricane preparation.
One talk a little bit about what you've been up to. You have a documentary set that's been on Netflix or trying to get it on Netflix. You've been on PBS as well. The last House standing here. And what I like on the cover here is you say hope is not a strategy and that is certainly true. So tell us about the last House standing where people can find it.
And, you know, how relates to the work that that you're trying to convey out to the public.
Sure. The film is about how we blindly buy homes and build homes in places without truly understanding the consequences. And then we seem surprised when they get wiped out every year. And the house we themed it around was on Mexico Beach from Hurricane Michael. It was truly the last house standing in that area. And I actually came up with that name from watching Talladega Nights, the Ricky Bobby movie, where if you're not first, you're last.
And it's like, okay, sometimes you want to be last. I want to be the last house standing. I've actually had people argue with me. I wouldn't want to be the only house left if everybody else was wiped out. So what's wrong with you? You'd rather just be wiped out to now build a safe house? And that's what the film is about.
And we explore tornadoes and tornado zones, hurricane areas, fire areas. And with the hurricanes that we saw and it's what do you have to build that will survive the hazards in that area? And there's always something you can do to be safer. And so that's what the film focuses on. It's on to be TV, which most people have with if they have a newer television, you can get to be as you have to sit through some commercials.
But it's a great way to watch a lot of different films. And it's also on my website, The Last House Standing, Dawg, where you can go on there and rent the film. And it really is a wake up call for people, and it's all part of the theme of what drives my podcast about Tell us how to make it better.
It's what can we do to improve our chances? Because if we're waiting for somebody to change the building code or to come in with some master save for us, it's not going to work out too well because we can't even agree as a country what's what color the sky is. So to say, Well, let's change the building code.
That's tough to do. It happens. We have some examples in our film, but it doesn't happen easily. And you know, people have houses where the builder goes, He boss said. The house is built to code and I've interviewed architects on my podcast, but they say a good builder is building for the future. Not to code to code should be a four letter word.
It's like, well, code is not good enough. In Mexico Beach where they were wiped out, they're not even rebuilding to the standard that would survive another hurricane. Michael And that's the same story with with the rebuilding for me. And so that the film is designed just as a wake up call and I hope people check it out. We're working on another version of that.
So hopefully in the next six months or so called Built to Last Home buyer Beware. And it's just about all the things that go on behind the scenes in the houses that we end up in that we don't know about. And, you know, there's a whole lobbying industry that builders have to keep the code as low as possible.
Right. Following up on that, George, I was going to ask you this. I mean, everybody loves being near the coast, right? We just kind of intrinsic it's a intrinsically human kind of thing, right? But but aside from the idea of like, well, is just not going to happen to me, what do you think needs to be done? And I don't I want necessarily mean physically, financially or socially.
What do you think can be done to convince people, you know, have you're running to build things at the shore. You do have a risk, you know, to to emphasize to people, yeah, this legit can happen to you instead of just going, yeah, well, you know what happens to other people? Is there anything we can do? Messaging code, stronger code, obviously, but anything else that comes to mind to to really drive home this point.
In a brief short answer that that's depressing is no, there's probably not much because people have freedom in this country. They want to do what they want. Nobody wants to tell you where to live and what you can do. So now people are flocking to those areas. What we're seeing in Florida, you know, I live in Tampa and we want to switch homeowners insurance.
We can't even find a company that'll cover us and that happens to most people. And so you look at where the risk is the greatest. All those people that live right by the water, we're paying for that when we don't live by the water. So who should share that risk? And I think once it gets down to the point where you can't get insurance for living there, maybe things would have to change because right now that risk is spread out for everybody and it's hurting everybody because you can't get homeowner's insurance.
Auto insurance is leaving Florida like crazy. I'm sure that situation exists in other states. Building code is key. South Florida has the toughest building codes probably in the country, and you see a lot less damage down there when there are hurricanes. They saw those from in in southwest Florida. The newer structures did a lot better than the older ones.
Even the ones that weren't necessarily flood proof are strong enough. Newer is better than older, but we have a huge, older building stock in this country and you see it clean places out like Mexico Beach. You see what it did to Sanibel Island where all those things were would right on the water that just got obliterated by Ian.
And that's kind of a way of, okay, now you have a chance to rebuild. How are you going to rebuild? And they the example I told you about in ten City in Naples, they didn't do anything differently, but they fixed 20 houses in that neighborhood. Now, their flood insurance went way up. But if there's another hurricane this year, it'll flood again because there's nothing new that was done.
So I don't know what it's going to take, but I'm willing to stand on the Hill and keep screaming, Wake up. But it's it's it's it feels futile sometimes because it's hard to get people to change and accept it.
But I want to go at this from the perspective of a home buyer. If you're in the market and you want to be prepared or a hurricane, you know you're in a place that might be vulnerable. But also, you know, we're just seeing a lot of severe thunderstorms, too. And the wind, high winds that come with severe thunderstorms.
And is your home prepared? I mean, we're not just about tornadoes. We're just high winds from a strong a thunderstorm. You know, what are the questions that a prospective homebuyer should be asking the builder or the seller about? How is this home prepared for severe weather? The questions that you should be asking to see how well that house is prepared to handle severe weather?
You know, the first question I would ask them is what disaster did you consider when you were building this house and what have you done to cover those? I think you'll eliminate a lot of people real quickly with that, because I think the answer first of all, some of you may not even know, but they're going to look at you with a blank look and say, well, we built this house is built to code.
And it's like, okay, but are the is the roof bracketed to the walls? Are the walls bracketed to the foundation? Do you have hurricane windows? Are these double pane windows? Are they what wind rating does this house have? What is there foam sprayed in the attic that can give you that extra barrier of protection for wind? What's the garage door rating?
What's the door and the front door rating? You know, we had a friend when we first moved here. We went to their house and the door opened out. Not in. And I looked at I'm like, Why would you do this? This is so unwelcoming. And then I did a little research and realized those doors don't blow in. Brilliant.
But most builders don't want to do that because it doesn't look good when the door opens out into the face of the person that's knocking on your door. So there's a lot of things that you can ask and ask questions. And I got to tell you this for someone who made a film, I don't even know who the owner of the company who built my house, that's how bad a job I did because I dealt with the salesman and then the foreman, the guy that was out there working with us.
So I didn't get to ask a lot of those questions. So I'm somebody who knows these things now. I'd love to go back and do that because those knuckleheads couldn't answer any questions. They probably don't know anything. And then when you go in and you find things I had a guy on last week or he's on my podcast this week is a home inspector and he found a couple in the foundation that they left when they poured it and he pulled the cup out.
So now there's a little hole there that's not going to destroy the integrity of the house. But if the trash was that obvious, right by the end of the foundation, that entire house is probably filled with garbage. And if they didn't clean it and do that, what other lack of detail went on on that job site? So if you're buying a house, first of all, go around the neighborhood and see that builders, other job sites, see what their work looks like, how clean it is, how thorough they look, because most builders will give you a list of three or four happy customers that they have and say, talk to these guys.
They love me. They have a great house. Nobody gives out the bad guys. They're not going to say, Yeah, go talk to Phil. He sued me and I just had to pay them $1,000,000. You're not going to get those. You have to do your work. You have to ask questions. Don't get lulled into the eye, Candy, of the granite countertops and the wood floors.
Ask about the safety features and beat them over the head with it. If they don't want to deal with you, don't deal with them. Don't reward mediocrity. And that's what we always do, because we need a house quickly or we fall in love with it because it's a great backyard for our kids. Another thing I like to do and a lot of people don't have access to this, but I would ask you, the subs worry that worked on the House and find out if those guys were any good because your house is only going to be as good as the total of all those people that worked on it.
So I know the pool builder that my builder hired probably couldn't blow up an inflatable pool. This guy was a moron and we have problems with it all the time. You want to know who these people were? When you have somebody come to to look at your electrical and they go, Wow, that doesn't look right, then you have to think about all that other stuff.
So ask a lot of questions and get access to the people who can answer them. And if they don't go find something else.
Good info, George. Yeah, I agree with you there. You know, I think we're going to wrap it up. I mean, we had a lot in a short period of time, but I just want to leave the floor open to you. Your message to our podcast listening audience here across the country about hurricane and home threat and how we can follow you.
Before we wrap it on up.
My main message is ask questions and be as prepared as you can. Don't be quick to make a deal and do your work because people aren't going to do it for you. And ultimately, it's only your fault if your realtor doesn't tell you something. Well, you could have researched it if your builder doesn't tell you something that maybe you didn't ask enough questions.
So I want people to ask more. Be inquisitive. You can. I told you where you could watch the last outstanding. You go to the last outstanding, dawg. And my podcast is Tell us how to make it Better and that's it. Tell us how to make it better. Dot com. And it's warning signs and solutions for homeowners. And I have guests every week to talk about things you should be paying attention to for your house, things you should know about, things you should be involved with in the building process and the design process, because your knowledge can make all the difference in the world.
And I'm telling you, I'm guilty of lack of knowledge. Don't make mistakes that I've made. So I try to point out things to people because, you know, you want to avoid those mistakes. My dad used to always lecture me and I go, Why are you telling me this? Because. Because I don't want you to make the same mistakes I did.
And I realize how smart he was. I see that blank look on my kids faces when I tell them that. And you go, Come on, just take some of this knowledge. It can only help you. It's not going to hurt you. And that's what I want people to come away with.
Awesome. Well, George, thanks so much for the time and the insight here as we get into the heart of Hurricane season. Thanks a lot again, We really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me on.
We'll be right back. Thanks again, George, for hopping on here. You know, he lives in the Tampa area, so he sees a lot of this firsthand, at least the threats for hurricanes firsthand. I do really like what you said about asking questions. I'm currently in the trying to buy a home market. And now I'm thinking as I look for houses, I should probably be asking more questions that I am already.
Sean, I think you how do you know? Bought a house, looked at the houses. Have you asked a lot of these kind of questions when you go into homeownership? I really kind of feel like a little afraid to ask these guys. It's just, you.
Know, it's it is hard. I mean, you do want a house. You're excited about being a homeowner for the first time or second time. And you're I've never bought one that was new. I've always bought one that somebody had been living in. And you double check that it's up to code, which is what he alluded to. But no, by my own admission, I haven't looked that deeply into this rating or that rating right.
So it's true. I mean, it's a hard it's hard to sit there and ask those questions. But if you do live in a place that is especially vulnerable. Now, having said that, if I were to be fortunate enough to start looking at property near the coast, I mean, with actually near the coast, I don't mean oceanfront, I mean within five or ten miles of the coast, I absolutely have to stop what I'm doing and think about that because only that there's insurance like he said, homeowner's insurance.
Suddenly you're having trouble getting that in Florida in the first place. We've also seen that in California because of fires. And this goes back to the whole climate thing, which you alluded to, Matt. So, yeah, it's there's a lot to unpack as the as the expression goes.
I just want to say one thing too. You know, with the insurance, you know, in Atlantic City, New Jersey Shore where I cover, you know, day in and day out, a lot of talk is about discounts on your FEMA flood insurance. There is something called the community rating scale where, you know, it's a combination of paperwork done actual things in the towns that help you accumulate points and get discounts on your FEMA flood insurance.
You can get up to 45% off on your FEMA flood insurance if you live in a town that takes these tests seriously about mitigating coastal flooding. We have a town here, Avalon in New Jersey. Beautiful area, beautiful town. They get 35% off. And that's the only town in the state that gets that kind of percentage off and that saves, you know, across the whole town over $1,000,000 a year just by the the increase in the rating there.
You know, so they it's called the community rating scale. You can check it out. It goes from level ten, which is no percent off the level one, which is 45% off. But if you live along the coast thinking about buying along the coast or along a waterway, rivers, check that out because you know your town, you know, you may want to talk to your elected officials a little bit more about, hey, maybe we should be doing some of this, you know, as you go forward.
Well, one of the things that stood out to me is, you know, you can ask the question, was this house built to code? And the answer is yes. But then the follow up question is, well, what is the code? And, you know, I think that's something that has to be looked at because are we building homes the right way?
Are we building them to withstand increased extreme weather? And extreme weather is happening more frequently. It's becoming more likely that your home is going to be impacted by a hurricane or impacted by a severe thunderstorm. And so the code that we were building to may not be up to par now. I think we really have to look into that.
But the problem is in order to build a safer house that can withstand strong winds, it's going to cost more. And we already know there's a big problem with the cost of housing. And so when you tell people, well, now we have to increase the home costs to build it safer, but that shouldn't be we shouldn't compromise safety, you know, for cost.
So I think what we need to look at is ways to improve the safety of homes and make them be able to withstand extreme weather better, but not have this huge inflated cost, because that definitely will turn a lot of people. Well, you don't want people to say, well, no, I'm going to pass on that. I'm going to build a little less safe house just to save money.
You don't want it to come to that. So that's something we really have to look at moving forward, I think is making sure that we keeping things affordable, but also improving the quality of. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, another episode in the books here. We will be back with you next Monday as well. And before we do that, we want to tell you you can, if you have any questions, whether question the climate questions, questions about us, you cannot give us a shower all on social media.
You can find us there or if you are interested, we still have our hotline that you can check out. That phone number is 609272. I keep forgetting this 7099. So you check us out there and you can give us a phone call as well as we get an email. I'm sorry. Podcast. Podcast. Sadly, dot net you want to send in.
There you go. If you don't feel like calling it is 2023. People always feel like calling you. You can go to podcast. Yes, I leaked that as well. Taking a look at what we have down the road. We got a nice mix of people. We have. We have Zeke, Hoss, Father Sean. They say that right.
As Father Yep.
House Father We're talking about the near record or record warm ocean waters. The August summit episode is going to be Bruckner Chase, who does a lot of stuff nationally based in my home market here, here, Atlantic City, about ocean and coastal safety. And we have Sally Warner talking about warming of the deeper oceans from hurricanes here. And then on August 21st, heat and football.
So we have you scheduled out with plenty of Across the Sky podcast episodes for the next couple of weeks. So plenty of listening to you. I hope everyone's enjoying what it's putting out for you over summer and tell friends old friend, about our podcast. We think they're interested in what we have to say, so meteorologist Sean Sublette, meteorologist in the corner, I am urologist Joe Martucci signing off for another episode of the Across the Sky podcast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.