The storm has passed. Your phone has forty missed calls, half your board is trying to reach you, and you have no idea yet whether the roof on Building 3 is still attached. This is where the job either gets managed or gets away from you. What you do in the next 72 hours shapes the insurance claim, the legal exposure, and how fast residents can get back to normal.
Hour one to six: safety and access
Before anything else, confirm nobody is trapped, injured, or in immediate danger. If you cannot reach the property in person, call your on-site staff or a board member who can. Check for downed power lines, gas odors, structural damage that blocks exits, and standing water near electrical panels. If FPL or the local utility has not cleared the area, do not let anyone re-enter buildings with visible damage. This is not the moment to be a hero for the sake of a faster reopening. A wrongful injury claim after you knew about a hazard will cost the association far more than a few extra days of closure.
Call your property insurance carrier or agent within this window if you can get a signal. Most policies require prompt notice of loss, and Florida carriers are flooded with claims after a major storm. Being early in the queue for an adjuster visit matters. Get a claim number even if you have not fully assessed damage yet.
Hour six to twenty-four: document everything
Photograph and video every unit of damage before any cleanup begins. Roof damage, water intrusion, downed fencing, damaged common area equipment, pool enclosures, elevators, generators. Date and timestamp if your phone allows it, and narrate what you're looking at in the video. Adjusters and, if it comes to it, attorneys will lean heavily on this record. Do not let anyone start ripping out drywall or hauling debris until you have images, unless it is an emergency mitigation measure like tarping a roof or extracting standing water to prevent mold.
Speaking of mitigation: Florida law and most insurance policies require the association to take reasonable steps to prevent further damage. That means tarping, boarding, and water extraction should happen fast, even before the adjuster arrives. Keep every receipt and contract for this emergency work. Use licensed, insured contractors if at all possible, even under time pressure. An unlicensed crew doing hurricane repairs is a liability magnet.
Get word to your board president and at least one other officer as soon as you have a damage picture. They need to know what you're seeing and what decisions are coming, especially anything requiring emergency spending authority under the association's declaration or bylaws.
Day two: communication and vendor triage
By day two, residents want answers even if you don't have them all. Send a notice through whatever channel still works, email, text blast, a sign posted at the entrance, giving a factual status update. What's confirmed damaged, what's being assessed, what the timeline looks like for utilities and access. Silence breeds panic and rumor. You don't need perfect information, you need honest information.
Start lining up vendors: roofers, restoration companies, tree removal, generator technicians. After a major hurricane, every association in South Florida is calling the same fifty contractors. If you have an existing relationship or a signed pre-storm contract, use it now. If not, get multiple associations in your portfolio, or your CAM network, sharing leads on crews that are actually responding.
Day three: assess governance obligations
By 72 hours, check whether board meetings, elections, or statutory deadlines are affected. Chapter 718 and Chapter 720 both have provisions addressing emergency powers during a declared state of emergency, including the ability to conduct board business without a quorum physically present and to make emergency repairs without prior unit owner approval in some circumstances. The exact scope of those emergency powers depends on current statutory language, so confirm with association counsel before relying on them, rather than assuming what applied in a past storm still applies today.
Also check on statutory notice deadlines for board meetings or annual meetings that may fall in the immediate aftermath. Some can be postponed under emergency provisions; others may need a formal board vote to reschedule. Don't guess. A quick call or email to counsel in the first three days is worth far more than untangling a challenged board action six months later.
The first 72 hours will not feel orderly. But safety first, documentation second, communication third, and governance check fourth is a sequence that holds up under pressure and holds up under scrutiny later.