A Waterfront Owner's Storm Season Checklist

Storm season in Northeast Florida is a known quantity. What varies is how much of your waterfront is ready for it, and that is largely decided months earlier.

This is the checklist we would give a neighbour.

Before the season

These are the checks worth doing while there is still time to act on what you find.

The wall

Walk the lawn, not just the cap. Depressions, soft spots, settled pavers, areas you keep topping up. These mean soil is leaving through the wall — and a storm will accelerate that enormously. Void filling and grout injection before the season is far cheaper than the same work after.

Sight down the wall. Stand at one end and look along the line. Any section leaning, stepped out or dropped? Photograph it from the same spot so you have a before.

Look at the toe at low water. Scour at the base, exposed pile below the expected mudline. This is the embedment your wall depends on, and surge attacks it hardest.

Check the cap. Rust staining, cracking, spalling, any gap between cap and wall. Cap repair is much cheaper before reinforcement is exposed.

Check drainage. Weeps clear, downspouts and irrigation not discharging at the wall, grade falling away from it. Hydrostatic pressure from trapped water is a leading cause of rotation, and storms deliver a great deal of water very quickly.

The dock

Piles in the tidal zone and below the waterline. Section loss, softness, borer damage. Jacketing a pile before the season is a small job.

Hardware and connections. In brackish water these fail before framing does, and surge finds every weak connection. This is the highest-value pre-season item on the dock.

The shore-end tie-in. Where the dock meets the wall.

The lift. Cable condition — broken strands, fraying, corrosion, kinks. Cables are a safety item and surge loading is not the moment to find out they were marginal.

Around the property

Anything that can float or fly. Dock boxes, furniture, loose timber, equipment. Make a plan now for where it goes.

Trees and limbs near structures.

Photograph everything in good condition. A dated before-record is worth a great deal if you later need to show what changed.

In the days before a storm

Realistically, this window is about removal, not repair.

• Take off or secure everything loose on the dock and the shoreline
• Remove or secure anything that floats
• Get the boat where it needs to be, well before conditions deteriorate
• Secure or remove dock accessories where practical
• Take a final set of dated photographs
• Then stay off the structure. No dock, wall or shoreline is worth being on as weather arrives.

After the storm

First, safety

Stay off the wall and off the ground directly behind it. Overtopping removes soil from behind a wall and leaves a crust at the surface that will hold weight right up until it does not. This is the single most common way people get hurt after a storm on a waterfront property.

Stay off the dock until it has been looked at. Structures that have moved can be unstable in ways that are not visible.

Then, document

Photograph everything before you move anything. Dates on the files. Wide shots and close-ups: the cap along its full length, the wall face at low water, every depression in the yard, debris lodged against structures, high-water marks on nearby buildings, and the dock from several angles.

Photograph the things that look fine too. Later you may need to show that something was undamaged, or compare against a before.

Note what has moved. Doors that stick, gates that no longer latch, slabs that have tilted, a dock sitting at a new angle. Movement in adjacent structures is evidence about what the ground did.

Then, assess

The serious storm damage is invisible from the top — toe scour and voids behind the wall from overtopping. A wall that came through looking untouched can have lost a significant share of its embedment.

Get it inspected before accepting a price from anyone. After a regional event there is a lot of door-to-door work about, some of it good and some of it not.

Then, stabilize before repairing

Where soil is actively leaving, the first phase is stopping it — grout injection to seal the paths and void filling to rebuild the ground. That stops the damage compounding while the full scope is permitted and scheduled.

Full detail: bulkhead storm damage repair and seawall storm damage repair.

On insurance

Document thoroughly and do not let active soil loss run while a claim is processed — that is how a repair doubles in size. Coverage questions are between you and your carrier. We provide clear written scopes and estimates, which is generally what carriers ask for, and we do not make representations about coverage.

Call (904) 327-3931 or send photos.