Every spring around this time, two things start happening in New Orleans at once. The crawfish get bigger and cheaper, and a quiet little voice at the back of your head starts whispering, "you should probably check the batteries in the flashlight." Welcome to hurricane prep season, the official soft launch of summer.
Hurricane Preparedness Week runs the first full week of May every year, which means if you live here, the city is gently reminding you to do the thing you've been putting off since last October. Hurricane season starts June 1 and runs until November 30, and pretending it isn't coming is a hobby we all share.
This is your local's guide to New Orleans hurricane prep, written by people who have stood in the bread aisle at Rouses next to a stranger debating whether to buy the brioche or the white. We've all been there. Let's get ready.
Why New Orleans Hurricane Prep Hits Different
Other cities prep for hurricanes. New Orleans has an entire emotional season for it. There's the polite check-in calls with your mom. The group chat that suddenly gets very active when something is "out in the Gulf." The spreadsheet your most organized friend has had since 2017 that quietly resurfaces every June.
Part of this is geography. We're sitting in a bowl, surrounded by water, with infrastructure that the rest of the country writes very concerned articles about. Part of it is memory. Most New Orleanians have a personal hurricane timeline, the storms you measure your life against. Where you were for Katrina. Where you were for Ida. The cone-of-uncertainty days you ate gas station boudin in a Comfort Inn somewhere outside Atlanta.
The other part, the part nobody puts in the official guides, is that New Orleans treats hurricane prep like a community ritual. You text your neighbors. You check on the older folks on your block. You bring beer to whoever has the chainsaw. If you've never had to help drag a downed water oak out of someone's driveway with eight people and a Yeti full of Abita, you haven't fully integrated yet. Wear it like our Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are shirt and pass the work gloves.
The Real New Orleans Hurricane Prep Checklist
Skip the generic lists. Here's what you actually need, organized for how this city actually works.
Documents and Information
Get a waterproof folder or a freezer bag. Inside it: copies of insurance policies (homeowners, flood, wind, car, life, all of them), driver's licenses, passports, social security cards, birth certificates, vehicle titles, recent tax returns, and a list of medications. Take photos of every room in your house, every closet, and the inside of your fridge. Insurance adjusters love photos. Save them to the cloud, not just your phone, because phones drown.
Write down your evacuation contacts on actual paper. Cell towers go down. Your aunt in Houston who said "y'all can stay here if it gets bad" has a phone number, and you should know it without your phone telling you.
Supplies for Staying
If you're riding it out, plan for at least seven days without power, water, or air conditioning. Stock one gallon of water per person per day, plus extra for pets and the cat that came with the house. Non-perishables that don't require cooking. A manual can opener. Batteries in every size you own. A real flashlight, not just your phone. A battery-powered radio. First aid kit. A week of any prescriptions.
Two things New Orleanians always forget: bug spray and ice. The bugs come out after a storm like they've been waiting. Ice goes from $2 a bag to "do you have any ice" in about four hours flat.
Supplies for Leaving
If you evacuate, the kit changes. Cash, at least a few hundred in small bills, because gas stations across the South lose card readers in the same storm you're running from. Phone chargers and a car charger. Snacks that survive a glove compartment in 95-degree heat. A small bag of clothes for a week, including one nice shirt because you'll inevitably end up at someone's wedding or funeral that gets rescheduled mid-evacuation.
The city of New Orleans publishes an evacuation route map and shelter info on NOLA Ready, and you should look at it before there's an actual storm coming. Reading it the morning of is too late.
House Stuff
Walk your property. Anything that isn't bolted down becomes a projectile in a Cat 3. That includes your neighbor's plastic chairs, the cute little garden gnome from Magazine Street, and the trash cans the city forgot to pick up. Trim back the trees touching your roof. Clean the gutters. Take a hard look at your roof. The National Weather Service's New Orleans hurricane prep page has the boring technical stuff if you want to nerd out.
If you have flood-prone neighbors, you already know to move stuff up off the ground floor. If you're new here, the rule is simple: anything you can't replace goes up high.
The Wetlands Reality Check
We can't talk about New Orleans hurricane prep without talking about wetlands. Louisiana is losing the equivalent of a football field of coast every 100 minutes. Those marshes are the natural buffer between the Gulf and the city. Less marsh means more storm surge means more of us scrolling weather Twitter at 2 a.m. in August. Wear our Make Wetlands Not War shirt and tip your hat to the people fighting the good fight at places like the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Coastal restoration is hurricane prep too, just on a 50-year timeline.
How New Orleans Actually Tracks a Storm
The official advice is to monitor the National Hurricane Center. The local advice is more layered. You watch Margaret Orr like she's family. You scroll WWL for the local angle. You pull up the spaghetti models and pretend you understand them. You text the one friend who has actual meteorology training and ask if "this one looks bad."
You also develop a personal threshold. Some people pack the car at the first cone. Some wait for a mandatory evacuation order. Some have a contraflow rule, which goes: if I-10 westbound is contraflowed, I'm gone. Whatever your threshold, decide it now, before you're standing in your kitchen at midnight watching a weather model run.
For the casual humor of it all, our Strange Things Below Sea Level tee captures the mood pretty well. Yes, we're in a bowl. Yes, we're below sea level. Yes, we keep choosing this. We laugh because the other option is crying, and even our crying down here turns into a parade eventually.
The Unwritten Rules
There are rules nobody publishes that locals all know. Don't be the person who waits to fill up gas the day a storm enters the Gulf. Don't be the person who doesn't board up because "it'll probably miss us." Don't be the person who evacuates and forgets to tell anyone where you went. Don't be the person who ignores a mandatory evacuation because you've ridden out worse. (You haven't. The river always wins eventually.)
Do check on your elderly neighbors. Do offer your spare room to the friend whose house floods on Cat 1 rains. Do bring food back when you come home, because the grocery stores will be empty for a week and your neighbor's freezer just defrosted. Do take pictures of any damage before you start cleaning up.
And do laugh, eventually. The storm passes, the power comes back, the sno-ball stand reopens, somebody puts on WWOZ, and life keeps going. We've been doing this since 1718.
How Dirty Coast Hurricane Preps
We've been making shirts about this city since 2005, which means we've also been making shirts through about 20 named storms. A few designs that pair well with a packed go-bag: the Come Hell Or Bywater tee, which is its own kind of mission statement. The aforementioned Make Wetlands Not War for the long game. And Sportsman's Paradise Lost for anyone who wants to wear their feelings about Louisiana's coastline on their chest.
We also make the shirt you might want when you're explaining to your cousin in Pennsylvania why you're doing this again: Be A New Orleanian Wherever You Are. That phrase came out of a Katrina evacuation, sketched on a napkin in a Lafayette coffeehouse. It's still the north star.
A Closing Word from the Bowl
Hurricane prep in New Orleans is not actually about hurricanes. It's about taking care of each other. The supply list is just the structure. The real work is checking on your people, knowing your neighbors' names, having the chainsaw, having the room with the air mattress, having the friend in Memphis with the spare bedroom. We've spent 300 years figuring out how to live here, and most of what we figured out is that we figured it out together.
So this week, charge the lantern. Top off the prescription. Move the patio chairs. Text your aunt. Go buy that one extra case of water. And then go get a sno-ball, because it's almost summer and the cone of uncertainty is still empty for now.
FAQ
When is hurricane season in New Orleans?
Hurricane season runs from June 1 through November 30 every year. The peak window is mid-August through October. Hurricane Preparedness Week is the first full week of May.
Do I need flood insurance in New Orleans?
Most likely yes. Standard homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Even neighborhoods that have never flooded can flood given the right rainfall plus storm surge combo. Look at the National Flood Insurance Program and talk to a local agent.
What's the most important thing to do first?
Make a written evacuation plan you can actually execute. Where you would go, who you would call, what you would pack, and what would trigger you to leave. Everything else is checklist details. Without a plan, the checklist is just stuff in a closet.
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