Most storm preparation advice is about the days before a storm. This is the version for the weeks before a season: an hour of checking that makes every later week easier, starting with knowing what your address is actually exposed to.
Most preparation advice is written for the 48 hours before a storm, when everything is expensive, crowded, and rushed. The version worth more is the one you do weeks earlier, calmly, on an ordinary afternoon.
Preparing for the wrong hazard is a common and expensive mistake. A house exposed to rain flooding, a house exposed to seawater during a storm, and a house on a slope need three different sets of decisions.
So the first fifteen minutes go to reading your own address:
If you have never read one for the house you live in, that is the gap worth closing first. Reading your hazard report walks through the sections.
If the screening comes back showing more exposure than you expected, do not do everything at once. Order it:
Every season, shops sell out of things people buy in a hurry: pumps, sandbags, generators, waterproofing sold in tubs. Some of it is genuinely useful and some of it is money spent to feel prepared.
The difference is knowing what you are preparing for. A pump helps a house where water arrives slowly and needs to leave. It does nothing for a house exposed to fast-moving water, where the answer is elevation and not equipment. Waterproof coating on a wall does not help when the water comes in under the door.
So the order matters: read the exposure first, then decide what to buy. An hour of reading in advance is worth more than a rushed afternoon of shopping.
Most of this list still applies, with two adjustments. Clearing drainage and knowing the shut-offs are things you can do regardless of who holds the title. Structural changes and raised outlets are conversations with your landlord, and the best time to have them is now, not during a storm.
It is also fair to ask your landlord directly what the property's history is. If you are on the tenant side of this, the full version is in renting a house or apartment, and the landlord's own version is in renting out your property.
The first pass through this list is the long one, because you are finding out things about your own property that you did not know. Every year after that is a much shorter job: clear the drains, walk the perimeter, check the roof, update the photos. Put it in the calendar on the same date each year, before the season rather than during it, and the hour stops being a chore and starts being the reason nothing surprises you.
A hazard screening reads public national datasets at your coordinates. It cannot see your roof, your wiring, your neighbour's new wall, or the culvert that has not been cleared since 2019. It tells you which of those things to go and look at first, which is exactly what an hour of preparation needs.
CheckHazard does not replace a professional geotechnical or engineering survey.