Guide
Hurricane preparedness for equipment users
If your health depends on something that plugs in, June is when you plan for it — not the afternoon the cone shifts.
This page is specific to Florida for a reason
Hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November. A South Florida power outage after a storm is measured in days, not hours, and it arrives with heat and humidity that make an un-air-conditioned home genuinely dangerous for a frail person.
If you use a CPAP, a nebulizer, a feeding pump, an alternating-pressure mattress, a power wheelchair, or anything else that needs electricity, that is a plan you need to have made already.
Register on the Special Needs Registry now
Florida counties maintain a Special Needs Shelter registry for residents who need medical support or electricity during an evacuation. Registration is done in advance — not during a storm warning — and it is how emergency management knows you exist.
- Palm Beach County, Broward County and Miami-Dade County each run their own registration.
- Register through your county's emergency management office, and re-register when they ask you to.
- Tell them exactly what equipment you depend on and what power it needs.
Needs Florida sourcing before publish: Add the current registration links and phone numbers for Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade emergency management before publishing. Verify them each May — they change, and a dead link on this page is worse than no page.
Power
- Contact your electric utility about medically essential service programs. Being on that list does not guarantee restoration priority, but not being on it guarantees nothing.
- Battery backup. Many CPAP machines run from a DC battery pack; know whether yours does and have the cable. Test it before the season, not during.
- Car chargers and inverters for smaller devices. Never run a generator indoors, in a garage, or near a window — carbon monoxide kills people after every storm.
- Charge everything when a storm is named, not when it is close.
Supplies
- Keep two weeks of consumables where you can grab them — ostomy, catheters, dressings, enteral formula, incontinence products, CPAP filters.
- Ask us early. If your resupply is due in storm week, call us before the shipping networks stop. We would far rather ship you early than fail to ship you at all.
- Waterproof the important things. Supplies in sealed bags; documents in a waterproof folder.
- Keep a written list of your equipment, model numbers, medications and prescriber contacts — on paper, because your phone may be dead.
If you evacuate
- Take the equipment, its power supply, and its consumables — not just the machine.
- Take the written list.
- Tell the shelter what you need on arrival.
- If you use oxygen, this planning is not optional. Speak to your oxygen supplier well before the season.
Related
About this guide
This is general information written to be useful, not medical advice, and it is not a coverage determination. It does not replace what your own clinician has told you about your own situation — where the two differ, follow your clinician.
We deliberately publish no prices, allowables or fee-schedule figures. Those vary by plan, state and year, and a stale number is worse than none. Call (800) 304-7030 and we will verify your actual benefit.
Not sure where to start?
Call us and tell us what happened — a surgery, a new diagnosis, a discharge date, a supply you keep running out of. We will tell you what is usually needed, check your benefits, and ask your prescriber for the order if you do not have one yet.