Hurricane season runs from June through November, and a pool is one of the few things around a Broward home that needs handling both before a storm and after one. Most of it is straightforward. One common instinct is genuinely destructive.
Do not drain your pool before a storm. It is the single most damaging thing you can do. The water in the pool is what holds the shell down against the saturated ground beneath it. After heavy rain, groundwater pressure under an empty pool can lift it — cracking the structure or pushing it out of the ground entirely. That is a replacement, not a repair.
Before the storm
- Leave the water in. If you are worried about overflow, lower it a few inches at most. Never empty it.
- Put loose items in the water, not the yard. Patio furniture and light fittings become projectiles in high wind. Small furniture is safer at the bottom of the pool than airborne.
- Do not cover the pool. A cover will not keep debris out in hurricane wind, and it will tear or trap debris against the surface. An uncovered pool is easier to clean afterwards.
- Shock the water beforehand. Raising chlorine ahead of the storm gives the pool a buffer against the organic matter about to land in it.
- Cut power to the equipment at the breaker. Pumps and heaters are damaged by surges and by running dry. Switch them off at the breaker, not just at the timer.
- Protect exposed equipment if you can. If the pad is unsheltered, wrapping the motor helps keep driven rain and grit out of it.
After the storm
Give it a day if you need to — but the longer organic debris sits in warm water, the harder the recovery gets.
- Look before you touch anything. Downed power lines near the pool, or any chance the equipment is standing in water, means calling the utility rather than approaching it.
- Get the debris out first. Leaves and branches decaying in warm water strip chlorine and feed algae. Everything else waits until this is done.
- Check the equipment is dry, then restore power. Never power up a pump that has been submerged — it needs assessing first.
- Bring the level back down to the middle of the skimmer, so the skimmer can actually work.
- Run the filter, then clean it. Circulation is what recovers the water. Expect the filter to need cleaning far sooner than normal.
- Rebalance from scratch. Storm water dilutes chlorine and stabiliser and drives pH down, and runoff brings phosphates in with it. Treat it as a full reset, not a top-up.
Why storms turn pools green so fast
A hurricane delivers, in a day, everything the rainy season delivers slowly: dilution, acidic water, and a large amount of organic matter and phosphate all at once. Chlorine is diluted at exactly the moment demand for it spikes. That combination is why a clear pool can go green within about 48 hours of a storm — and why the recovery is mostly about debris removal, filtration and phosphate, not simply pouring in more chlorine.
The short version
Leave the water in, kill the power, get the loose items secured, and shock it beforehand. Afterwards, debris out first, then circulation, then chemistry. Pools that recover badly are almost always the ones left with organic matter sitting in warm water for a week.
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