Hurricane Hanna made landfall on the Willacy County coast on July 25, 2020 with 90 mph winds. By morning it had dropped 15.60 inches of rain on Mission and left about 150,000 Hidalgo County homes without power, with a flash flood emergency running along the U.S. 83 frontage roads. It was the first hurricane to reach the Valley since Dolly in 2008, a twelve year gap.
That gap is the real danger. Twelve quiet years is long enough for a fleet to be built, staffed, and run by people who have never moved trucks ahead of a storm. The plan below exists so the first time is not improvised.
Why the Valley floods differently
The four border counties drain slowly, toward the river on one side and the Laguna Madre on the other. After Hanna, the county estimated 24 to 48 hours for water to come off the roads. For a fleet that means the storm is not the whole event: the two days after it are, and a truck parked in the wrong low spot on Friday can still be sitting in water on Sunday.
That drainage reality drives every choice below. You are not just protecting vehicles from wind for a night. You are choosing where your equipment spends a weekend.
72 hours out: decisions
- Decide which vehicles move, which stage, and which park. High ground is the whole game; know your yard's low spots before the season, not during the watch.
- Top off every fuel tank and every transfer tank. Pumps need power, and power is what goes first.
- Confirm your driver contact tree actually works: one test message, everyone confirms receipt.
- Pull your insurance policy and read the comprehensive coverage and the flood language now, while the questions are still hypothetical.
48 hours out: records and staging
- Photograph every vehicle, walkaround style, timestamped. Odometer, tires, body panels, cargo areas. If a claim comes, the before pictures are worth more than any argument.
- Export what lives only in a cab: paper logs, fuel receipts, inspection books. Anything that dissolves in water gets a photo or goes in a bag.
- Stage generators, chargers, and fuel cans where they will be reachable after the storm, not behind the thing that floods.
- If you run telematics, confirm location reporting is healthy on every unit. A tracker with a dead install is a truck you cannot find after the water moves it.
24 hours out: freeze
- Vehicles in their assigned spots, keys accounted for, cab windows checked.
- No loads dispatched that cannot deliver and return before conditions close the roads. A truck that beats the storm out but cannot get back has just become someone else's parking problem.
- Charge everything: phones, tablets, camera systems, jump packs.
After: the 48 hour rule
- Do not move trucks through standing water to inspect them sooner. The drainage takes the time it takes.
- Photograph everything again, same angles as before, before any cleanup.
- Check every vehicle that sat through the storm before it runs a route: air intakes, electrical connectors, brake components, anything that sat low.
- File claims with the before and after photo sets together. The pairing is what makes the adjuster's job fast and your payout clean.
Where the technology earns its keep
A storm is the one event where a fleet's tracking and cameras stop being about drivers and start being about the assets themselves. Location history proves where a vehicle sat when damage happened. Camera footage timestamps water levels. Both turn an insurance argument into an insurance record. If your current system cannot tell you where every unit sat through a weekend of no power, that is worth fixing in the quiet season.
The quiet season is the deadline
Every item above is cheap in February and impossible at 24 hours out. If your fleet has never run this plan, run it once as a drill: pick a Saturday, pretend the cone is real, and see what breaks. Then contact us if you want a second set of eyes on the plan, the yard, or the technology that documents all of it. That review is part of what our Fleet Safety Assessment covers.
Sources: National Weather Service event record for Hurricane Hanna, July 2020, via the PFI Fleet Research Library; Hidalgo County post-storm drainage estimates.
Want a second set of eyes on your storm plan, your yard, or the technology that documents all of it? Call 956-420-7676 or email [email protected]. A real person answers.