Hurricane Season Plumbing Checklist for North Florida

Find your main shutoff now, not during the storm

The single most useful thing you can know about your own plumbing is where the main water shutoff is and whether it actually turns. In most Jacksonville homes it is at the meter box near the street or on an exterior wall. Try it before storm season — a valve that has not moved in fifteen years often will not, and that is a small repair now and a disaster later.

Everyone in the household who might be home alone should know where it is too.

Know where your sewer cleanout is

Heavy rain saturates the ground and can overload the municipal system, which is why sewer backups spike after a storm rather than during it. Your cleanout is the access point a plumber needs to clear the line, and it is usually a capped pipe at ground level between the house and the street.

Clear the vegetation around it and make sure the cap is intact. Some older homes have no accessible cleanout at all — worth knowing before a backup, because installing one is a scheduled job and not an emergency one.

Before the storm arrives

None of this takes long, and it prevents the majority of the calls we get in the days afterward.

• Fill bathtubs and containers with water for flushing and washing if you may lose supply or pressure
• Keep drinking water separate from utility water — do not rely on a tub
• Turn off the water heater's power or gas if you expect to lose water supply, so it cannot fire on an empty tank
• Avoid running laundry, dishwashers or long showers during the peak of heavy rain to keep load off a stressed sewer system
• Secure or shut off irrigation so a broken line does not run unnoticed
• Photograph the plumbing areas of your home while everything is dry — it makes any later insurance claim far easier

If you lose power

On city water, gravity and municipal pressure usually keep water flowing during an outage, but pressure can drop. On a private well, no power means no pump and no water at all — which is the case for many properties in western Clay County and rural St. Johns County. Store water accordingly.

If you have a sump pump or a sewage ejector pump, an outage disables it. Know what that means for your lowest fixtures before the water starts rising.

After the water recedes

Do not assume a slow drain will clear itself once the rain stops. If several fixtures are slow at the same time, or the lowest drain in the house backed up, the main line needs looking at — often because storm water pushed silt and debris into it, and sometimes because a saturated line finally revealed a break.

If any part of your plumbing was submerged, treat a gas water heater's controls and any electric heater's elements as suspect until they are checked. And if you smell gas anywhere near a heater, leave the building and call the gas utility before you call anyone else.