After a hurricane, a multifamily property is not one damaged building. It is dozens or hundreds of households, each with its own emergency, sitting inside your emergency. The first 72 hours decide how the next 12 months go: whether residents stay or scatter, whether the claim is built on evidence or memory, and whether mitigation contains the damage or the damage keeps compounding. Here is the sequence I run.

Hours 0 to 12: life safety and stabilization

  • Account for residents and staff. Everything else waits.
  • Identify and isolate hazards: downed lines, gas odors, structural damage, compromised balconies and stairs. Physically barricade, do not just warn.
  • Shut off water to units with major intrusion where feasible, and kill power to flooded areas through qualified hands.
  • Open your emergency contact channels to residents and tell them what you know, even when what you know is incomplete. Silence from management in hour six creates panic and rumor by hour twelve.

Hours 12 to 36: document before you disturb

Once people are safe, the property is a giant evidence scene, and mitigation crews are about to change it. Get ahead of them:

  • Photograph and video every building elevation, every roof area you can safely access or fly, and representative unit interiors, wide and close, before tarps and dryout begin
  • Log the date and time of every photo set, every event, every decision, starting now
  • Report the claim to your carrier and get the claim number in this window, not next week
  • Start one master file: photos, notes, contacts, receipts. On a multifamily loss the file gets enormous fast, and organized beats complete every time

Hours 24 to 72: mitigation at scale

  • Roof tarping and building envelope closure on the worst buildings first, sequenced by damage severity, not by which building is closest to the office
  • Water extraction and drying in affected units, because mold at multifamily scale is a second catastrophe with its own timeline
  • Secure vacant and uninhabitable units against entry
  • Keep every invoice, every crew ticket, every equipment receipt. Emergency spend is generally recoverable, but only when it is documented

One warning that belongs in bold in every multifamily playbook: after a hurricane, your parking lot will fill with contractors offering to handle everything, and some will push assignment of benefits agreements or open ended emergency contracts with per unit pricing that would embarrass a casino. Sign nothing beyond defined temporary mitigation at defined prices. The permanent scope decisions come later, with vetted contractors and a clear head.

Residents and the business interruption clock

Track displaced units and lost rent from day one, because those numbers feed the claim. Communicate with residents on a rhythm, daily at first, with honest timelines. Retention after a storm tracks with communication quality more than with damage severity. Your residents can forgive a hurricane. They do not forgive silence.

Multifamily storm response is a project management problem run at sprint speed, and it is unforgiving of improvisation. If you own multifamily in hurricane country and your 72 hour plan is a phone number for a roofer, start a conversation before the season does it for you.

The last piece is people capacity. A hurricane response runs on staff who may have flooded homes of their own, so decide in advance who does what: one person owns documentation, one owns vendor coordination, one owns resident communication, and everyone knows the chain. Feed them, spell them, and bring in outside help early rather than late. The plan on paper only works at the pace of the humans running it, and burned out site staff make expensive mistakes in week two.

People first, photos before mitigation, receipts for everything, and no signatures on anything bigger than a tarp in the first 72 hours.