Protect your home this hurricane season

Life Kit

NPR

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4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hurricane season can feel unnerving for many, especially as hurricanes grow more intense due to climate change. WUSF climate and environment reporter Jessica Meszaros breaks down how to know your flood risk level and ways to flood-proof your home so that you'll be more secure this season. This episode is part of NPR's Climate Solutions Week, a series where we examine how to be more resilient in a changing climate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
0:08.5	Hey, it's Mariel.
0:10.6	Atlantic hurricane season started on June 1st, and it's hard to process for a lot of people whose communities and homes were wrecked by hurricanes last year in states like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
0:25.4	A lot of people are still rebuilding.
0:27.8	That's the case for Jessica Mazzaros.
0:29.9	She's a climate and environment reporter at WUSF, the NPR member station in Tampa.
0:34.7	She will rapidly intensify as it quickly moves towards the Big Bend area where it's
0:39.6	one critical thing people can do to prevent mold buildup.
0:43.4	After you noticed any trends in storms recently in terms of like how frequently they come
0:48.2	around or how frequently does FEMA offer to those impacted by storms?
0:52.5	Like what is available to them?
0:54.4	Last year, during Hurricane Milton, she was working long hours getting people the information
0:58.8	they needed ahead of the storm.
1:00.6	And my fiance and I are spending, you know, two nights in a row, staying up to 1 a.m., boarding up
1:05.9	the house, and then the floodwaters came in anyways from underneath the house.
1:10.9	So needless to say, it was a really exhausting time.
1:15.2	They were actually some of the lucky ones in Tampa.
1:18.0	They had a few inches of rainwater flood their one-story house,
1:21.5	but it wasn't salt water, which can be much more corrosive.
1:25.3	Still, rebuilding has been a lot of work.
1:29.2	And Jessica doesn't live right on the water or even in a flood zone. On this episode of Life Kit, how to prepare your home for
1:35.2	hurricanes and flooding, two things that climate change is making more intense. I talk with Jessica
	...

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