Five Steps to Prepare for Hurricane Season
Staying informed and connected to family and friends, especially during severe weather events, is a top priority. It’s imperative to plan ahead for how your family will handle hurricane evacuations if a major storm threatens our coast.
HTC wants you to know before severe storms hit our area, we take necessary precautions. These precautions are to protect our equipment and support you with reliable service.
HTC teams place sand bags around our retail offices and remote stations. This is to protect the equipment that provides your telecommunication services. We also prepare our generators to be available and ready to use in a time of need.
Lastly, we prepare for any outages caused by severe storms by assembling teams that work 24/7 to monitor disruptions in service. We deploy those teams as soon as it’s safe for our employees to travel to remote stations and make the needed repairs to restore service.
HTC is dedicated to creating a storm preparation plan that keeps our employees safe and you connected to those who matter most. Your cooperative wants the same for your family. You need to follow these five simple steps to prepare for hurricane season.
- First, be sure your cellphones and other mobile devices are fully charged. Have extra or chargeable batteries as backups or have an external battery charger on hand for additional usage.
- Second, consider a quality surge protector for your home. A whole-house surge protector will guard against power surges caused by lightning or downed power lines. Without this protection, electronics and appliances in your home are susceptible to major damage from extreme bolts of electricity.
- Third, build a family communication plan. Be sure everyone’s cell phones have the correct phone numbers for out of area family members, and choose a point of contact for all family members to contact if they become separated.
- Fourth, if flooding is a concern, move your electronics and HTC equipment to a higher room in your home, like the second floor or attic, if possible.
- Lastly, backup important data from your computer, phones and cameras on external hard drives or thumb drives. The cloud is ideal for saving all your information so you don’t have to worry about protecting the equipment.
Preparing now will help you better protect your family when major storms approach our community.
