48 Hours Out: What To Do Right Now
The cone is about to be on you. Here's what the next two days look like.
Mark Vitalis
Principal Contractor
She's looking at her phone now. The cone on the NHC map covers the whole island like a hand laid flat over it. Someone in the neighborhood group chat just typed: this one's real.
She doesn't know what to do first.
You moved here for the life. The water. The pace of it. The way the light comes off the harbor in the morning. Nobody mentioned that the Atlantic gets a vote — and it votes every June through November without asking permission. What follows is what you do. In order. Starting now.
The homeowner in Estate Richmond watching that ceiling stain spread since the last rain band. The East End family with a 30-year flat roof and a generator that hasn't turned over since before Fiona. The newcomer in Christiansted who just saw that cone for the first time and felt something cold move through them that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. This post is for all three.
Where do you get real information?
Not Facebook. Not the neighbor who's been here fifteen years and swears it'll turn north. Every storm turns north — until the one that doesn't. Irma turned north — right into St. John's face. Maria went where it wanted.
Go here. Nothing else.
- National Hurricane Center — nhc.noaa.govUpdated every six hours. The track. The cone. The wind field. This is the source. Everything else is someone's interpretation of this.
- VITEMA — vitema.vi.govThe Virgin Islands Territorial Emergency Management Agency. Sign up for Alert VI right now. Text, email, phone — all three. When they post, you stop and read it.
- National Weather Service San Juan — weather.gov/sjuLocal watches and warnings specific to the USVI. The NHC gives you the picture. NWS San Juan gives you your island.
- VI Source — stthomassource.com · stcroixsource.com · stjohnsource.comThe journalists who covered Maria from inside it. They were here. They'll be here for this one too.
Check every 4 hours. The track will shift. When it does, you need to know before the grocery store runs out of water and the gas stations turns into “Black Friday” opening scenes.
Sandbags: this errand comes before everything else
Before the grocery store. Before the hardware store. Before anything.
Six bags per household. Bring your ID and your own shovel. Six inches of water stopped at your front door is a different life than six inches inside it. That difference weighs about 50 pounds of sand.
VITEMA distributes through the Department of Public Works and VI Fire stations when a system is tracking toward the territory. Hours change fast. Check vitema.vi.gov the moment you finish reading this.
St. Croix distribution sites:
- • Department of Public Works — Estate Anna's Hope
- • Department of Public Works — Concordia Site
- • Cotton Valley Fire Station
- • Grove Station Fire Station
St. Thomas & St. John:
- • St. Thomas: DPW sites island-wide and fire stations territory-wide.
- • St. John: Local fire stations during active distribution.
The line grows by the hour. Go now.
Your house: reduce what the storm takes
Let's be honest about something first. If your roof had a problem before this storm, it has a problem now. Nobody is showing up in the next 48 hours to rebuild your roof. That window closed the day hurricane season started. What you now can make the damage smaller.
Walk the exterior
Go outside. Look up. Put your hand on the soffit. Push the shingles. Anything that moves, anything loose, anything that's been meaning to get fixed — photograph it. Date the photos. Your insurance company will be looking for any reason to call the damage pre-existing. Don't hand them one.
Clear your gutters. A blocked gutter in a Caribbean rain band stops being an inconvenience fast. It becomes a waterfall running straight down your interior walls. Five minutes on a ladder now. Weeks of mold remediation later if you skip it.
Check what's mounted on your roof that shouldn't be moving. AC units, satellite dishes, anything strapped down with good intentions and not much else — verify it. In 120mph winds, loose equipment doesn't stay on your roof. It goes looking for somewhere else to land. It doesn't care whose house that is.
Doors, windows, and the thing nobody thinks about
Storm shutters close now. Not when you hear the first band. Not when the rain starts. Now — while you can still work without the wind pushing back, or fix something you did not see since last year’s preparation.
No shutters? Plywood is your savior. Minimum half-inch. Screwed into the frame — not nailed. Nails pull. Screws hold. That distinction will matter at 3am when the first band comes through.
The garage door. Almost nobody thinks about the garage door and it is the largest, most vulnerable opening on most homes. A failure there lets wind pressure build inside the structure. What happens next is the roof goes. Brace it from inside — a commercial hurricane brace kit, a 2x4 bar across the center tracks. Do something with it before dark.
The yard
Everything out there is a weapon now. Chairs, grills, tools, plants, lumber, toys, anything left on the property since the last time you thought about it — bring it inside or tie it to something that will not move. If it's too big and too heavy, call your neighbor and tell them it's there.
Do not cut trees now. A falling branch in a storm is bad. A freshly cut branch with no root system and nowhere stable to fall is worse. That was last month's job.
Your cistern: what most newcomers get wrong
A well-built USVI cistern is sealed. It has a small access hatch — about two feet across, usually accessible from inside the house. Storm debris doesn't walk through the walls. What gets in is the water coming from above. That's the part most people miss.
Your cistern fills from your roof. Rain runs off the surface, down the downspouts, and into the tank. That system works beautifully for eleven months of the year. During a hurricane, it becomes a liability. Hurricane rain is not clean rain. It carries heavy Atlantic salt, debris, and whatever the storm has stripped off rooftops and roadways across a hundred miles of open ocean. That water flows directly into your cistern if you leave the system connected. And once it's in, it's in. You now have a cistern full of water you can’t use. You cannot un-contaminate your water supply, once the damage is done.
Before the storm arrives, cut the flow.
Most homes on this island have one of two setups. A diverter valve on the downspout — turn it, and the rainwater bypasses the cistern and drains away instead. Or a removable inlet block at the cistern opening — place it manually before the bands arrive.
Know which system you have. Go find it now, in daylight, before you need it in the dark.
After the storm passes and the roof looks clean — reconnect. Let the first good post-storm rain flush the surface before you open the flow back to the tank.
Your cistern is why families had water within days after Maria while other islands waited months. Protect it like it saved your family. Because one day it will.
Water: fill every pot, pan, and tub
When the power goes, the pumps go. Unless you have a solar-powered pump or a gravity-fed setup, your access to water stops the moment WAPA fails. Fill up your bathtub and every large pot and pan you have around the house. You aren't just doing this for drinking. It could come in handy to cook, wash, and manually flush the toilet. When the taps go dry, a bathtub full of grey water is the most valuable resource in your home.
The Interior: prepare for a breach
If the wind finds a way in, the rain follows. You need to operate on the assumption that some part of your house will be compromised. The strategy is simple: if it can't get wet, it goes in plastic.
The 'Dry Bag' Strategy
Put your important papers — passports, deeds, insurance policies — and essentials like matches in a sealed plastic lock bag. That way, everything stays dry and moisture-free. The worst thing you can face is trying to light a gas stove with wet matches in the dark. Seal them now.
Bag the tech and the linens
Put your laptop, tablets, and chargers in heavy-duty plastic garbage bags. Do the same for a spare set of sheets, towels, and pillows. If the house gets compromised, you may still have dry bedding to sleep on immediately after the storm. A dry pillow is a luxury you won't appreciate until you're trying to sleep in a damp room while the wind is still howling.
Food: stop buying frozen meat
Half this island heads to the grocery store when a storm is tracking in and fills a cart with frozen chicken, frozen fish, frozen everything. Every season. Makes them feel prepared. Wrong move every time. Think about what happens to that freezer 72 hours after the power goes out. You have a warm box full of spoiling protein.
What you actually want:
- • Rice. Bags of it. A 25-pound bag cooks on a single gas burner, or a coal-pot, costs almost nothing, and keeps a family fed.
- • Dried beans and lentils. Rice and beans kept the Caribbean alive long before refrigeration existed. That math hasn't changed.
- • Canned fish — tuna, sardines, mackerel. Or preserved foods like saltfish, smokeherrin and pitgails and neckbones.
- • Peanut butter. Crackers. Instant oatmeal — hot water, done, children eat without complaint.
- • Canned vegetables. Box of Ramen Noodles. Canned coconut milk. Whatever your family actually eats.
- • Coffee, tea bags. If you need this explained, you haven't been through a Caribbean storm yet. You will understand after this one.
Cook what's in your fridge and freezer today, while the power is still on. Eat it first. Then you eat from the shelf. A camp stove with two extra fuel canisters is worth more right now than anything in that freezer.
Here is where most "experts" will tell you to lock everything down tight. Seal every opening. Button up the house completely.
Those experts have never been inside a Category 5.
Wind at that speed doesn't just push — it finds pressure differentials and exploits them. Too much pressure building inside a sealed structure with nowhere to go will take the path of least resistance. Sometimes that path is your roof. Sometimes it's a wall. It happened to the person writing this. The house didn't leak. It didn't flood. It exploded!
The counterintuitive move — the one people who have actually ridden out the bad ones know — is to **leave your louvers open behind the shutters.** Wide open. Yes, moisture comes in. Yes, the inside of your house will be wetter than you want. But a wet house is a standing house. Pressure has somewhere to go. The structure breathes instead of building toward a catastrophic release.
This is not in any FEMA pamphlet. It is in the lived experience of people who stayed on this island when the serious storms came through. Listen to them over the pamphlet.
Know where the shelters are before you need them
If your roof is questionable — leave. That is the whole decision. Make it early, before the roads are flooding and the wind is already at 60mph and the choice has been made for you. Shelters open 24 hours before expected landfall. Know where you're going before that announcement comes.
St. Croix:
- • St. Croix Educational Complex
- • D.C. Canegata Ballpark
- • Beeston Hill
St. Thomas:
- • Ivanna Eudora Kean HS
- • Lockhart K–8 School (pets allowed)
St. John:
- • Adrian Senior Center
- • Gifft Hill School
Medical and special needs: Schneider Regional Medical Center (St. Thomas) · Career and Technical Education Center (St. Croix). Pre-registration required. Call V.I. Dept of Human Services: 340-774-0930 (STT) · 340-773-2150 (STX).
Emergency contacts — save these now
| Agency | Phone |
|---|---|
| VITEMA St. Thomas | 340-774-2244 |
| VITEMA St. Croix | 340-773-2244 |
| VITEMA St. John | 340-776-2244 |
| VI Fire & Emergency Services | 911 |
| WAPA outage reporting | 340-774-3552 |
| Red Cross St. Thomas / St. John | 340-774-0375 |
| Red Cross St. Croix | 340-778-5014 |
FAQ
I just moved here. How bad can it actually get?
Hurricane Maria was a Category 5 when it hit the USVI in 2017. Irma came through two weeks before that. Both storms are within living memory for everyone on these islands. The people who underestimated them learned a hard lesson. Take the forecast at face value.
Do I need sandbags if I'm not in a designated flood zone?
Yes. Sandbags stop water at entry points — doors, garage openings, low areas of the structure. Sustained tropical rainfall at hurricane intensity floods areas that never flood otherwise. Six bags costs you an afternoon. A flooded floor costs you weeks.
What if I can't reach anyone when the storm is happening?
Sign up for Alert VI at vitema.vi.gov before the storm arrives. Once it passes and cell service restores, VITEMA and VI Source will have current information on road conditions, shelter status, and recovery resources. During the storm itself — stay inside, stay low, and wait.
Don't stay alone
For your mental health, try not to ride out the storm by yourself. It can feel like the end of the world to be alone, scared and helpless.
My generator won't start. What do I do right now?
Go to the hardware store today, not tomorrow. Bring it in for a check, or buy a new one if you have to. Fuel cans should be full. Run it for 20 minutes now to confirm it works before you need it in the dark.
One more thing
The woman with the yellow gallery rail in Christiansted is going to be fine. Not because of luck. Because she moved early. Because she took it seriously before she had to.
The Atlantic doesn't give credit for good intentions. It doesn't grade on a curve for people who just got here. It comes the same way for everyone.
Know your house. Know your cistern. Know where your people are going if the structure isn't solid.
Move now. Not after lunch. Now.
The storm will pass. When it does, the damage will show itself — and that is when you call Mark. Solution Construction has been rebuilding what the weather takes for 27 years. Start here →
When the Storm
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