Hurricane season in Texas starts on June 1. That is about three weeks away. For most facility managers and business owners, that is plenty of time to get ahead of the work — if you start now.
At DSC, we have walked a lot of buildings the day after a storm. The pattern is almost always the same. The big stuff — the roof, the windows, the generator — usually gets attention before the storm. The smaller, quieter systems do not. The fire alarm panel, the camera recorder, the access control reader, the battery in the locked utility closet. These are the things that fail first when the power goes out and the rain starts coming in sideways. They are also the things you need most when you are trying to figure out what happened.
This is a practical guide to getting your security and life safety systems ready before June. It is built around three windows of time: what to do three weeks out, what to do when a storm is on the way, and what to check after it passes.
About 80 percent of major U.S. power outages between 2000 and 2023 were caused by severe weather. In Houston, we have lived through enough of them to know the pattern. Power flickers. The building goes quiet. Backup batteries kick in. And then, often, something does not come back the way it should.
Fire alarm panels are required by code (NFPA 72) to have backup batteries strong enough to run the system during a power loss. But batteries age. Surveillance systems are usually on a UPS that gives you twenty to thirty minutes of runtime — long enough to ride out a flicker, not long enough to survive a real storm. Access control doors quietly switch to their fail-safe or fail-secure state, which may or may not be what you want during an evacuation. Everything is connected, and everything has a weak point. The goal of the next three weeks is to find those weak points before the storm does.
This is the window where preventative maintenance pays off. None of these tasks are dramatic, but skipping them is what creates the 2 a.m. phone call later.
Start with batteries. Every fire alarm panel, every access control panel, every UPS protecting a recorder or a network switch has batteries that need to be tested under load — not just looked at. NFPA 72 requires it once a year. If you cannot remember the last time it was done, it is overdue.
Next, look at surge protection. Cameras, NVRs, and network switches all need surge protection on both their power lines and their data lines. A nearby lightning strike can ride right up an unprotected Ethernet cable and take out a whole camera run in a second. If your last surge protection inspection was years ago, the devices themselves may already be spent.
Then, your generator and automatic transfer switch. If you have one, run it under load for the time the manufacturer recommends. Confirm the transfer switch actually hands off to backup power cleanly. Many buildings discover the hard way that the generator works fine but the transfer switch does not.
Finally, your records. Update your emergency call list. Confirm your monitoring center has the right contacts. Make sure your video recorder is backing up to the cloud or an offsite location, not just the drive sitting in the rack. Footage is only useful if it survives the storm.
Once a storm has a name and a track aimed at the coast, the window narrows. The work shifts from preparation to confirmation.
Top off any batteries that are not fully charged. Walk the building and look at every outdoor camera. Is the mount tight? Is the cable secured? Is anything loose that could become a projectile? Confirm that your access control doors are set the way you want them for an emergency — fail-safe doors will unlock when power is lost so people can exit, and fail-secure doors will stay locked for perimeter protection. Both are valid. Just make sure the right doors are in the right mode.
Call your monitoring center and your integrator. Confirm that signals are coming through clean and that they have an after-hours contact for you. If you have a contracted service agreement, you are usually a priority for dispatch. If you do not, you are at the back of a very long line.
The first 24 hours after a storm are when most quiet failures show up. Walk the building with a checklist, not a memory.
Check the fire pump, the sprinkler risers, and the fire alarm panel for trouble lights or off-normal conditions. Look at every camera view from your phone or workstation. If a camera is offline, do not assume it is just rebooting — log it. Pull a few minutes of recorded footage from the hours of the storm and confirm it actually saved. Test a few badges at key doors. Look for water intrusion in any room that contains electronics. And document what you find, because insurance and code officials will both ask.
The honest answer is that the buildings that come through a storm cleanly are not the ones that scrambled the week before. They are the ones that were already on a regular maintenance rhythm. Batteries got tested in March. Cameras got cleaned in February. The generator ran last quarter. The call tree was already accurate.
If you are not on that kind of rhythm yet, the next three weeks are a good time to start. We are happy to walk your building, review what you have, and give you an honest assessment — whether we installed it or not. That is what we do.
If you have questions about your fire alarm, cameras, access control, or backup power before June 1, give us a call at (713) 464-8407 or send us a message online. We would rather have the conversation now than after the storm.