The T-Minus Storm Countdown Card for Pets: Whose Clock It Runs On

This is the card that goes on the door of the coat closet where the carriers live, or inside the kitchen cabinet, or wherever your household already looks when something is happening. It is not the hurricane guide. Our hurricane pet preparedness playbook is the guide, and it is where the watch-to-warning strategy, the per-pet supply math, and the shelter question live. This page is the execution card that hangs next to it, and the whole reason it exists is that a strategy you read in June is not the thing you can follow at two in the morning with a cat under a bed.

One thing has to be settled before a single row of it makes sense, and it is the thing most printable countdowns get wrong.

T-0 Is Not Landfall

Every hour on this card counts backward from the onset of tropical-storm-force winds where you are. Not landfall. Not the hurricane-force winds. Not the moment the eye crosses the coast on television.

That reference point comes from the National Hurricane Center’s own hurricane-hazards page, which explains why it picked that threshold rather than a stronger one: “Tropical storm-force winds are strong enough to be dangerous to those caught in them. For this reason, emergency managers plan on having their evacuations complete and their personnel sheltered before the onset of tropical storm-force winds, not hurricane-force winds.”

The same threshold runs through the National Weather Service’s alert definitions. A Hurricane Watch means hurricane conditions are possible in your area and is issued 48 hours before anticipated tropical storm-force winds. A Hurricane Warning means hurricane conditions are expected and is issued 36 hours in advance of tropical storm-force winds. Tropical Storm Watch and Tropical Storm Warning use the same two windows for their own conditions. Storm Surge Watch and Storm Surge Warning are described by NWS as generally within 48 and 36 hours. At the far end of the same scale sits the Extreme Wind Warning, which NWS defines as extreme sustained winds of a major hurricane, 115 mph or greater, usually associated with the eyewall, expected to begin within an hour. That last one is not a planning product. It is a take-cover product.

If you build your countdown from landfall, you will be planning to leave during the hours that the people who run the roads have already planned to be finished. Build it from tropical-storm-force winds, and the rest of the card lines up with the timings your county is using.

Your storm’s arrival time for tropical-storm-force winds is not a number this page can give you, because it is specific to a storm that does not exist yet. It comes from the National Hurricane Center’s advisories and graphics for the active system, and it moves. Check it every advisory cycle rather than locking in the first estimate you see.

There Is No National Countdown. That Is the Finding, Not a Gap.

We went looking for a federal hour-by-hour household countdown so this card could just reproduce it. As checked on August 5, 2026, it does not exist in the places you would expect it. Ready.gov’s hurricanes page, last updated 07/09/2026, organizes its guidance as Before, During, and After, with no hour markers attached. Ready.gov’s pets page, last updated 03/20/2026, gives actions and no hours at all. The National Weather Service’s watch and warning definitions page gives the two product lead times above and nothing resembling a household schedule.

The hour numbers that do exist are published by states and counties, and they are not the same numbers.

That is not a flaw in the system. Evacuation timing is a road-capacity problem, and road capacity is local. A parish with one causeway and a parish with four interstates cannot run the same clock, so they do not. What it means for you is that a printed countdown is only as good as the county figures written on it, and those have to come from your county, not from us.

So this card ships with three kinds of rows. Rows sourced to a named agency, which you can trust as printed and which carry the jurisdiction they came from. Band edges we chose ourselves, labeled as ours so you know to overwrite them. And rows with a blank, which are yours to fill in from the four phone calls listed after the table. A card with the blanks empty is half a card.

The Card

Print this. The right column is the one you write in.

Read this line before you read the table: any row whose middle column names a group you belong to is a departure row for you, whatever the action column says. The action column describes a household that has not yet been ordered out. Three of the rows below carry orders aimed at named populations, and those orders arrive well before this card’s departure rung.

Hours before onset of tropical-storm-force winds	Who publishes an hour here	Pet action at this rung	Your number
T-96 and earlier	No household figure from any federal source we checked. MSU Extension Publication 2507 (POD-01-26) sets 96 hours for livestock, counted from predicted landfall, not from wind onset.	Large animals are already moving if you have them. For household pets: confirm prescription supply, confirm your county’s pet-shelter rules for your species, confirm the destination that agreed to take you. Freeze gel packs if a cold-chain medication is in the kit. Outdoor and free-roaming animals start coming in as soon as a storm is in the forecast cone: Ready.gov’s instruction is “at the first sign or warning”, which carries no hour and is usually earlier than the watch.	____
T-72 to T-50 (T-72 is our banding; T-50 is published)	Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana publishes Phase 1 of the state three-phase system beginning 50 hours before tropical storm winds are anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast, which is a regional reference point, not wind onset at your address. Phase 1 is directed at offshore workers, people on coastal islands, people in low-lying areas, the special medical needs population, and people aboard boats.	The last window in which businesses are reliably open and phones are reliably answered. Vet, pharmacy, boarding, hotel, county emergency management. Carriers come out of storage and stay out. If Phase 1 names your group, this row is your departure.	____
T-48	NWS: Hurricane Watch issued 48 hours before anticipated tropical storm-force winds. Monroe County, Florida, under Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8, for a pending major hurricane (category 3-5): mandatory evacuation of non-residents, visitors, RVs, travel trailers, live-aboards and military personnel initiated approximately 48 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, per a 2012 county resolution (see the currency and trigger note under this table).	Bring every outdoor and free-roaming animal inside now and keep them in. Confine cats to one closed room. Documents into the waterproof pouch. Non-perishable kit staged by the door. If you are a visitor, an RV or travel trailer occupant, a live-aboard or military personnel in the Keys, this row is your departure, not your prep.	____
T-40	Plaquemines Parish: Phase 2 begins 40 hours before tropical storm winds are anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast. Phase 2 covers all people at risk, including those outside levee protection, those in a manufactured home, RV or similar, and those in low-lying or flood-prone areas.	Crates, bowls, litter, sealed water and towels go into the vehicle. No animals, no refrigerated medication, no food you care about. If Phase 2 names your group, this row is your departure and the pre-load happens on the way out the door.	____
T-36	NWS: Hurricane Warning issued 36 hours in advance of tropical storm-force winds. Monroe County, Florida, under Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8, for a pending major hurricane (category 3-5): mandatory evacuation of mobile home residents, special needs residents, and hospital and nursing home patients initiated approximately 36 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, per the same 2012 resolution (see the currency and trigger note under this table).	Preparations should be finished, not starting. Final head count of animals and their locations. Fuel. Cash. Phone and battery bank charged. If you are a mobile home or special needs resident in the Keys, this row is your departure.	____
T-30	Plaquemines Parish: Phase 3 begins 30 hours out on the same Louisiana coast reference point, and this is the phase in which contraflow runs. Monroe County, Florida, under Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8, for a pending major hurricane (category 3-5): mandatory phased evacuation of permanent residents by evacuation zone initiated approximately 30 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, per the same 2012 resolution (see the currency and trigger note under this table).	If your zone has been called, this is departure, not preparation. Animals load last and load fast because everything else is already in the vehicle.	____
T-24 to T-12 (our banding)	Your county, for your zone. There is no national figure here.	Final capture window in daylight. Cold-chain items move from the refrigerator to the cooler at the last possible moment. Litter box and reachable water into the cabin, not the trunk.	____
T-12 to T-6 (our banding)	Your county’s road, bridge and causeway closure thresholds, published by the authority that owns the crossing.	Loading an animal that is still loose, hiding, or outdoors is no longer a plan you can rely on. If you are still home, you are now deciding whether you are staying.	____
T-0	NHC: emergency managers plan on having evacuations complete and personnel sheltered before the onset of tropical storm-force winds.	Nobody is catching anything outdoors. Confine, secure, and shelter in place with the animals you have.	____

Four notes belong with the printed card, so copy them onto it. A fifth, at the end of this section, is about reading the source document behind the Monroe figures rather than about the card.

Your zone’s clearance time can be longer than every phase hour on this card, and where it is, it governs. A phase hour is when an order is issued. Clearance time is how long the road network needs to empty your zone, and it is published by your state or county rather than by any federal agency. South Carolina’s Emergency Management Division, in Annex C to the state Hurricane Plan, May 2026 edition, models a Central Hurricane Region evacuation of Zones A through F at 59.2 hours with no lane reversal under 100 percent visitor occupancy and 100 percent resident compliance, and a single-zone evacuation in the same region at 11.4 hours. Lee County, Florida’s clearance-time explainer states that an evacuation out of the county would have to begin 89 hours before storm-force winds reach it, on a page whose server last modified it on May 20, 2015 and whose resident counts cite 2010 Census data, so treat that one as an illustration of scale and get a current figure from the county. Both of those figures are larger than the earliest phase hour printed above, which is 50 hours. Where your county’s clearance figure for your zone is the larger number, your departure sits above the phase rows rather than on them, and our how early to leave with pets page is where that subtraction gets worked.

The rungs are not all the same kind of number. T-96, T-50, T-48, T-40, T-36, T-30 and T-0 each trace to a named publisher, listed in the middle column. T-72, T-24, T-12 and T-6 are our banding, not anybody’s published figure, and they are labelled as such above so you know which ones to replace with your county’s.

The hours are not all counted from the same point. This card’s axis is wind onset where you are. Plaquemines Parish’s 50, 40 and 30 are counted from tropical storm winds anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast. Monroe County’s 48, 36 and 30 read only “in advance of tropical storm winds”, with no location given. MSU’s 96 is counted from predicted landfall. For a household inland of the coastline, the coast figure and your figure are different hours. Ask your own parish or county office which point it counts from, and write that on the card next to the number.

The Monroe figures come from a 2012 document, that document states them twice, and neither statement is unconditioned. Board of County Commissioners Resolution 226-2012 was adopted on September 21, 2012. Its recitals quote Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8, which sets the three hours “in the event of a pending major hurricane (category 3-5)”. Attached to the same resolution is a memorandum of understanding between the state and the Keys local governments, and its Part Two, section H, headed “Evacuation Procedures”, states the same three hours again, describing them as procedures that “have been adopted or substantially adopted by the Local Governments (except the City of Key West) into their comprehensive plans, and by the City of Key West in Resolution No. 06-244”, which is to say the comprehensive-plan policy quoted above. Section H’s own three numbered sentences do not repeat the words “category 3-5”, and three features of the document carry that scope to them anyway. Section H sits inside the part headed “PART TWO: DATA, INPUT VARIABLES AND ASSUMPTIONS”. The MOU’s own recitals record that the input variables and assumptions it identifies are the ones the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity “finds accurately depict evacuation clearance times for the population of the Florida Keys for a Category 3-5 hurricane event, as required by Administrative Rule”. And the MOU’s Part One, headed “PART ONE: RECITALS”, states that “The above recitals are incorporated into this MOU and made a part hereof.” So a Category 1 or 2 storm is outside both statements of those hours, which is a scope limit rather than an assurance that nothing happens at those hours, and it is a reason to call the county rather than to read either statement as the answer. Monroe County’s current Evacuation Information page, read August 5, 2026, describes a “Phased Evacuation” by zone and publishes no hour figures for any population. Confirm the current hours and the trigger with Monroe County Emergency Management before relying on either.

If you pull that PDF yourself, expect two different-looking answers, and this one is our tooling note rather than the county’s. Re-read on August 24, 2026, the county’s copy of the resolution carries two text layers on the same pages. One preserves the document’s punctuation. The other strips it, rendering the policy’s “(category 3-5)” as “category 35”, “24-hour” as “24hour”, and the sentences above with no commas at all. Common PDF text extractors will hand you either one, or both spliced together on a single line. The quotations on this page are taken from the layer that preserves the punctuation, because that is the layer that also reproduces the resolution’s statutory citations intact. We checked both rather than quoting whichever came out first.

The four calls that fill in the blanks

Make these in the spring, not during a storm, and write the answers on the card in pen.

1. Your county emergency management office. Ask what hour marks each phase for your zone, what point that hour is counted from, whether pets are accepted at the shelters serving your zone, whether pre-registration is required, and which species are accepted. Ask the species question by name if you own anything that is not a dog or a cat.
2. The same office, second question: your zone’s evacuation clearance time. The phase hour is when the order goes out. Clearance time is how long the road network needs to empty your zone, and it is the number that actually sizes your window; in the jurisdictions that have modelled it, it is often longer than any phase hour on this card, which is why the departure rule at the bottom of this page takes the earlier of the two rather than the phase hour alone. Our how early to leave with pets page works that arithmetic and shows what published clearance times look like. Ask for both numbers, not just the first.
3. Your veterinarian and your pharmacy. Ask what a full evacuation supply looks like for each animal’s prescription and how far ahead they can fill it under your plan. Our medication refill calculator turns that answer into a reorder date so the buffer exists before the season rather than after a storm is named.
4. Your destination. The pet-friendly hotel, the boarding facility, the relative. Confirm it is still willing, still open in the season you are planning for, and still accepts your animals. Our pet-friendly hotel evacuation guide covers what to ask on that call.

One thing this card assumes and does not teach: that you can read your own county’s order when it arrives. Level 1/2/3, Evacuation Warning versus Evacuation Order, and lettered hurricane zones are three separate local systems that use overlapping words for different things. Our evacuation levels decoded for pet owners page is the translation, and it is worth reading once before you need the card.

The Rows, With Their Sources

T-96: the number that belongs to livestock, not to your dog

Ninety-six hours has become a general-purpose “start now” number on the internet, and its actual published home is narrower than that. Mississippi State University Extension’s Publication 2507, Hurricane Preparedness and Recovery for Beef Cattle Operations, carries it under a section headed “Before the Storm (96 hours)”: “A general rule is to start evacuation procedures of livestock 96 hours before a predicted landfall. Waiting too long runs the risk of severe traffic backup and contraflow traffic patterns, which could delay evacuation and put animal health at risk.” The edition we read carries the stamp POD-01-26.

Two scoping details matter before that number goes anywhere near a household plan. It is written for livestock, and it counts from predicted landfall, which is a different clock than the tropical-storm-force wind onset the rest of this card uses. Our horse and livestock evacuation basics page carries the full branch, including why large-animal doctrine runs a full stage ahead of household evacuation and why the fire-country rule and the hurricane rule are not interchangeable.

For a household with only indoor pets, what genuinely belongs at T-96 is not driving. It is the small set of tasks that fail if you start them late because they depend on someone else: a prescription that has to be authorized, a shelter registration that has to be processed, a boarding reservation that has to be accepted, gel packs that have to be frozen. Our insulin cooler travel case guide puts a real lead time on that last one, since a gel-pack case only reaches its rated range if the packs went into the freezer well in advance. That is a standing habit rather than a storm-week task.

T-72 to T-50: the last window with people on the other end of the phone

Louisiana’s clock starts earliest of the ones we checked. Plaquemines Parish’s contraflow page describes it as a state system: “For those residents in Plaquemines Parish, note that the State has established a three-phased system for contraflow.” Phase 1, in the parish’s own words, “Begins 50 hours before tropical storm winds are anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast”. The parish page describes that phase as directed at offshore workers, people on coastal islands, people in low-lying areas, the special medical needs population, and people aboard boats.

Read the wording carefully, because it is not phrased the same way as Florida’s. Plaquemines Parish writes its phases against tropical storm winds anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast. Monroe County writes its phases as hours “in advance of tropical storm winds”, naming no place at all. Which point your own parish or county is counting from is a question to put to that office directly rather than to infer from a phrase, and it is the single most useful thing you can write on the card.

Jefferson Parish, next door, publishes the instruction that follows from a phased system rather than the phases themselves: “When a storm is forecast to impact Jefferson Parish, take action immediately to be ready. Do not wait on contraflow or a mandatory evacuation order to be issued by Jefferson Parish Officials.” Two neighboring parishes, one publishing hours and one publishing a warning against waiting for them, is a fair picture of how much variation sits inside a single metro area.

What belongs to this rung for a pet household is everything that requires a human being to answer a phone. Once a storm is named and a region starts moving, the vet’s front desk, the county line, the boarding kennel and the hotel reservation desk all get busy at the same moment. Our when to buy pet emergency supplies for hurricane season page covers the shopping half of this problem and puts the durable purchases before the season entirely, which is the version that works.

T-48: bring the animals in, and stop treating that as optional

This is the rung with the clearest pet-specific instruction on the whole card, and it comes from the federal page most people already trust. Ready.gov’s Prepare Your Pets for Disasters, last updated 03/20/2026, states it under Stay Informed: “Always bring pets indoors at the first sign or warning of a storm or disaster.” The ASPCA’s disaster preparedness guidance says the same thing in the same words.

Neither one attaches an hour to it, which is why the card carries it at two rungs rather than one. T-48 is the hour by which it has to be done, because that is when the National Weather Service issues a Hurricane Watch, 48 hours before anticipated tropical storm-force winds, and a household that has not started by the watch is starting late. But “the first sign or warning” is not the watch, and on the hurricane coast it is usually earlier than the watch. The Tropical Weather Outlook is where a system first becomes public, and the horizon belongs to the National Hurricane Center, which issues the product. NHC’s tropical cyclone product descriptions page, read August 5, 2026, states that the Outlook “discusses significant areas of disturbed weather and their potential for development during the next 7 days, including a categorical forecast of the probability of tropical cyclone formation during the first 48 hours, and during the entire 7-day forecast period.” Take that horizon from NHC rather than from the National Weather Service hurricane watch and warning safety page this card cites for the alert lead times: read the same day, that page still restates an older 5-day version of the same product. So a system is public a week or so before any watch is issued, sometimes before it is a storm at all. Read Ready.gov’s instruction as written, with no hour on it, and start bringing animals in when a system shows up in the outlook rather than waiting for the watch. The T-96 row on the card says the same thing.

Monroe County, Florida also acts at roughly this hour, though on a completely different subject and only for a stated class of storm. Its Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8, quoted in the recitals of Board of County Commissioners Resolution 226-2012, provides that “in the event of a pending major hurricane (category 3-5)” the county implements a staged and phased evacuation whose first stage begins “Approximately 48 hours in advance of tropical storm winds”. The memorandum of understanding attached to that same resolution states the same first stage and names the group in full: “Approximately 48 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, a mandatory evacuation of non-residents, visitors, recreational vehicles (RV’s), travel trailers, live-aboards (transient and non-transient), and military personnel from the Keys shall be initiated.” It adds an instruction the policy recital does not carry: “State parks and campgrounds should be closed at this time or sooner and entry into the Florida Keys by non-residents should be strictly limited.” That is a tourism-capacity move, clearing the road ahead of the residents. If you are a visitor in the Keys with a dog in the room, it is also the hour your stay ends, for the storms the policy names. Two limits travel with those hours. Scope is one, and it reaches both places the resolution states them. Section H’s own three numbered sentences do not repeat the words “category 3-5”, but section H sits inside the MOU part headed “PART TWO: DATA, INPUT VARIABLES AND ASSUMPTIONS”, and the MOU’s recitals record that the input variables and assumptions it identifies are the ones the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity finds accurately depict clearance times “for the population of the Florida Keys for a Category 3-5 hurricane event”. The MOU’s Part One then states that “The above recitals are incorporated into this MOU and made a part hereof.” Section H also introduces its three procedures as ones already “adopted or substantially adopted” into the local comprehensive plans, which is where Policy 216.1.8 sits. So a Category 1 or 2 storm is outside what the county has published at this hour rather than covered by it, and that is a scope limit rather than an assurance that nothing happens 48 hours out. Currency is the other limit: Resolution 226-2012 is a 2012 document, so confirm the current figures with Monroe County Emergency Management rather than assuming a fourteen-year-old restatement is unchanged.

The action here is confinement, not transport. A cat with the run of the house at T-48 is a cat you may be hunting at T-14. Ready.gov’s other quietly useful line belongs here too: “Make note of where your pets hide, so you can easily find them in case you have to leave your house quickly.” Our guide to getting a hiding, scared or aggressive cat into a carrier is the technique page for the animal that has already gone under the bed, and our evacuating multiple cats guide covers the version where confinement has to happen several times over.

Documents belong here as well, because they are the only item on the card that a shelter door can turn you around for. Miami-Dade County’s instruction is one line: “Present medical and current vaccination records for each pet.” The same page requires annual rabies vaccinations and a visible Miami-Dade County dog license for dogs. Monroe County’s is one line too: “The medical history and current vaccination records for each pet must be presented upon checking in to the shelter.” Our pet emergency binder and waterproof document kit guides cover what that pile is and how to keep it dry, and what a pet shelter checks at intake covers the door itself.

T-40: the vehicle starts absorbing the load

Plaquemines Parish’s Phase 2 “Begins 40 hours before tropical storm winds are anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast”. The parish describes that phase as covering all people at risk, including those outside levee protection, those inside levee protection when an exceptionally strong storm threatens, those in a manufactured home, and those in low-lying or flood-prone areas.

For the pet household this is the pre-load rung, and it is the one that turns a chaotic departure into a short one. Ready.gov’s hurricanes page, last updated 07/09/2026, already sanctions the idea: “Have enough supplies for your household. Include medication, disinfectant supplies and pet supplies in your go bag or car trunk.”

What goes out at T-40 is the bulky, temperature-tolerant half of the kit. Empty crates and carriers. Bowls. Litter, litter box, and waste bags. Sealed bottled water. Towels and old bedding. A spare leash and collar. The weatherproof crate cover if you use one. Every one of those items is something you would otherwise be carrying out of the house while also holding an animal, and moving it now is the single biggest reduction in the length of your actual departure.

Two things do not go out at T-40, and the next section is about why.

T-36: the warning is not the start of your work

A Hurricane Warning is issued 36 hours in advance of tropical storm-force winds, per the National Weather Service. Monroe County, Florida moves its most vulnerable residents at roughly the same hour, inside the same category 3-5 condition as its other two stages: “Approximately 36 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, a mandatory evacuation of mobile home residents, special needs residents, and hospital and nursing home patients from the Keys shall be initiated.” That sentence is word for word the same in both places Resolution 226-2012 states it, the recital quoting Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8 and the attached memorandum of understanding at Part Two, section H. The condition reaches both. The recital states it in terms, and the MOU carries it through the recitals its Part One incorporates, as the Monroe note under the card sets out.

The instinct to treat the warning as the starting gun is the single most expensive timing error in this whole subject, and the reason is arithmetic rather than caution. Everything the warning tells you to do was supposed to have been done during the watch. If the warning finds your carriers still in the attic, you have lost the 12 hours between the two products, and you have lost them at the exact moment that everybody else in your region is also moving.

The pet actions at this rung are the ones you cannot pre-load: a written head count of every animal and where it currently is, fuel, cash, and a charged phone. If your household is deciding between sheltering in place and evacuating, that decision needed to be made at the watch, not here.

T-30: contraflow, and the last hour a road is a road

Plaquemines Parish’s Phase 3 “Begins 30 hours before tropical storm winds are anticipated to strike the Louisiana coast”. The parish calls it “the final and most serious phase of evacuation where authorities put maximum emphasis on encouraging evacuation and limiting entry into the risk area.” It is also the phase in which contraflow runs, and the page is direct about the end state: “When the storm gets close to the risk area, evacuation routes will be closed, and any persons remaining in the area, will be directed to a ‘Last Resort Refuge.’”

Monroe County reaches its resident phase at the same hour on a different clock, and again only for the pending major hurricane the policy names. Here the two versions in Resolution 226-2012 are not word for word. The recital quoting Comprehensive Plan Policy 216.1.8 stops at the zones: “Approximately 30 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, a mandatory phased evacuation of permanent residents by evacuation zone”. The attached memorandum of understanding finishes the sentence and then lists five named zones running from Key West to Ocean Reef: “Approximately 30 hours in advance of tropical storm winds, a mandatory phased evacuation of permanent residents by evacuation zone (described below) shall be initiated.” It also warns that the order is not fixed: “The actual sequence of the evacuation by zones will vary depending on the individual storm.” The two sentences after that one are the reason this whole row is a phone call rather than a printed figure. The first sends the reader to the right office: “The concepts embodied in this staged evacuation procedures should be embodied in the appropriate operational Emergency Management Plans.” The second dates the whole thing: “The evacuation plan shall be monitored and updated on an annual basis to reflect increases, decreases and or shifts in population”. A document that says of itself that it is updated annually is not a document to read fourteen years later as the current figure. What separates the two versions is length, not scope: the category 3-5 condition reaches the MOU through the recitals its Part One incorporates, as the Monroe note under the card sets out. The recital states the purpose those three stages serve, which is worth carrying next to the hours: they exist to “achieve and maintain an overall 24-hour hurricane evacuation clearance time for the resident population”. The phases are the county’s method for hitting a clearance target, not a leave-by time handed to a household.

If you get on the road at this rung, you are getting on it with everyone else, and our evacuation traffic gridlock with pets page is the one that covers what a stationary car does to an animal and which supplies have to be within reach of the driver’s seat rather than in the trunk. Read it before you need it, because the version of that lesson you learn at hour three of a queue is expensive.

Animals load last at this rung, and that is the entire payoff of the pre-load. If the crates are already anchored and the bowls are already in, the departure is a sequence of short trips carrying animals, not a sequence of trips carrying gear with animals mixed in. Our car loading with carriers and multiple pets guide owns the restraint and anchoring side of that, including what the Center for Pet Safety has actually crash-tested and why nothing rides loose, and our which pet to evacuate first page covers the harder call in a household where one trip does not cover everyone.

T-24 to T-12: cold chain last, litter box in the cabin

There is no national figure at this rung, and your county’s order for your zone may well already have come. The pet-specific work is the temperature-sensitive half of the kit, and it moves now because it could not move earlier.

Refrigerated medication is the clearest case. Two veterinary insulins in common use specify true refrigeration on their own labels: Merck Animal Health’s Vetsulin FAQ, read August 5, 2026 and re-read August 24, 2026, says Vetsulin “should be stored upright, protected from light, between 2°C and 8°C (35°F and 46°F)”. Two things about how that answer is written come from the August 24 re-read rather than the first one, and belong to that date. The first is that the range is published as the answer to a narrower question than a storage question, “Can I still use a vial of Vetsulin if it was forgotten outside the refrigerator between doses?”, and the answer opens with the word “Ideally,”. The second is that the sentence immediately after the range carries no hedge at all: “Vetsulin should always remain refrigerated.” The sentence after that one is the instruction for the case this page is actually about, a cold chain that has already broken, and it is worth carrying whole: “If you accidentally leave a vial out of the refrigerator, contact your veterinarian for instructions.” ProZinc’s label on the FDA’s DailyMed repository, read August 5, 2026, says to “Store in an upright position under refrigeration at 36-46°F (2-8°C).” Those are two products’ labels, not a rule about every veterinary drug, and yours may differ; check the one you carry. A range that narrow is why the vial stays in the refrigerator until the vehicle is actually leaving and why the gel packs went into the freezer days ago. One join belongs here, and it is this page’s own reasoning rather than a published protocol: the gel packs are frozen and the insulin must not be. ProZinc’s label follows its storage range with “Do not freeze.” Merck answers the matching question about Vetsulin with “No, freezing will damage the insulin molecules and reduce the efficacy of the product”, and says a vial that freezes in the refrigerator “should be discarded and a new vial should be used”. So the frozen packs cool the box the vial travels in; nothing on this card asks you to put a vial against one, and our cooler guide below is where that separation is worked out rather than improvised in a driveway. Our insulin cooler travel case guide covers the three cooler classes and their real runtimes, and our pet medication refrigeration in a power outage guide covers what to do when the cold chain breaks anyway.

The litter box, a reachable jug of water, a bowl, and a towel go into the cabin rather than the cargo area at this rung, for the reason our gridlock page lays out at length: anything in the trunk stops existing the moment the car stops moving on a contraflow route. Our litter box options page covers the confined-space version of that problem.

T-12 to T-6: the honest end of the capture window

Here is where a lot of printable countdowns invent a number, and we are not going to. Across the sources we checked on August 5, 2026, none publishes an hour by which catching a pet becomes unrealistic: Ready.gov’s pets and hurricanes pages, the ASPCA’s disaster preparedness guidance, the National Weather Service’s watch and warning definitions, and the National Hurricane Center’s hurricane-hazards page. What is published is the outer bound, and it is the National Hurricane Center line this card is built on: emergency managers plan on having evacuations complete and personnel sheltered before the onset of tropical storm-force winds.

The number that actually describes your household is one you have to measure. Our pet fire evacuation drill checklist is the page that times it, with a stopwatch, on an ordinary evening, and the figure it gives you is the only one that belongs on your card. A household of one dog and one crate is a different animal from a household of four cats, and no published table can tell you which you are.

Two things make the measured number smaller rather than making the deadline later. The first is the T-48 confinement instruction, which converts a capture into a pickup. The second is practice: Ready.gov’s carrier guidance is to leave the carrier out in places your pet frequently visits, leave it open, feed treats near and inside it, and add a familiar blanket. A cat that treats the carrier as furniture is not a timing problem.

Road and crossing closures also live at this rung, and they are set by the authority that owns the crossing rather than by the weather. If your route depends on a single bridge or causeway, that threshold is the real constraint on your departure and it is published by that bridge’s authority. Our bridge and causeway closure thresholds page covers how to find yours and why the answers differ by structure. Find it in the spring and write it on the card.

T-0: the card stops giving instructions

At the onset of tropical-storm-force winds, the card is finished. Nobody is catching a loose animal outdoors, and no drive is a reasonable plan. What is left is confinement, an interior room, and the shelter-in-place branch of your plan.

What Can Sit in the Vehicle Overnight, and What Absolutely Cannot

The pre-load is what shortens the departure, so it is worth being exact about its limits.

Animals never stage. AVMA’s pet-safety-in-vehicles page publishes the interior temperature rise a parked vehicle produces:

Elapsed time	Temperature rise inside vehicle
10 minutes	19°F
20 minutes	29°F
30 minutes	34°F
60 minutes	43°F
1 to 2 hours	45-50°F
2 to 4 hours	50-55°F

Source: AVMA, Pet safety in vehicles. The table carries the footnote “Temperature rise is basically the same, whether 70 or 110 degrees outside.”

That footnote is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters for a storm-week pre-load. A mild, overcast, pre-landfall morning is not an exemption. AVMA is also explicit on two points that matter here. On windows: “And cracking the windows makes no difference.” On the other end of the thermometer: “Cold weather can also threaten pets left in vehicles.” The same page names pets that are young, old, ill, or thin as particularly susceptible to cold environments. Our car loading guide carries the cargo-area version of the same risk, including the carbon monoxide problem an open tailgate creates.

Cold-chain medication never stages. It stays at refrigerator temperature until the vehicle is actually leaving.

Food you are relying on is the judgment call. A sealed bag of kibble in a hot trunk through a hurricane-season week is a storage decision with consequences, and our freeze-dried versus canned versus kibble comparison covers which formats survive that environment and which do not. If in doubt, the food goes at T-24 with the cooler rather than at T-40 with the crates.

Everything else can go early, and most of it should. Crates, carriers, bowls, litter, litter box, waste bags, sealed water, towels, bedding, spare leash and collar, ramp or steps if you use one, and the printed document pouch if it is in a sealed waterproof container.

What This Card Deliberately Does Not Decide

A card that tried to answer everything would be a worse card. Four questions live elsewhere on purpose.

Whether to leave at all. That is a hazard and structure question, not a timing question, and it belongs to shelter in place or evacuate.

Whether your animals physically fit. A departure plan that assumes one trip and turns out to need two is a plan that fails at T-24. Our how many pets fit in a car page covers the seating and securing ceilings, and multi-pet emergency planning covers grab order and per-animal supply math across species.

Where you are going. Whether that is a shelter, a hotel, or a boarding facility changes which documents you need and which species are welcome. See board your pet or evacuate together, pet-friendly hotel evacuation, and when your county has no pet-friendly shelter.

Species that do not travel like a dog. A fish tank, a reptile or aquarium on a heater, a flock of chickens, and a parrot each have their own preparation sequence, and several of them start earlier than the rows above.

The Shelter Row Is a Phone Call, and Here Is Why

We checked four Florida county pet-shelter pages on August 5, 2026, expecting to describe a common pattern. There is no common pattern. There are four different systems inside one state.

Jurisdiction	Pre-registration	Owner stays with pet?	Species accepted
Monroe County, FL	Offered online: “To pre-register your pet, you must complete the online registration form” and “Pre-registrations are only valid for the calendar year in which they were submitted”. The page’s enumerated admission requirements (caging, medical and vaccination records, Monroe County pet license, mainland residency proof) do not include pre-registration	Page does not state	Dogs, cats and ferrets with license and vaccination records; pocket pets; birds; reptiles at in-county shelters only, “Mainland shelters do not accept reptiles”
Miami-Dade County, FL	“Pre-registration is not required to use the evacuation center”	“At least one family member must remain in the evacuation center with the pet”	Enumerated: centers “accept up to four pets per person including the following animals” then lists birds, ferrets, gerbils, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats, “rabbits (small-sized, under 10 pounds, such as California or Dutch breeds)”. Dogs and cats are absent from that list although the same page requires dog licenses and cat rabies vaccinations. Count stated twice and not in the same unit: “Limit four pets per household” and “up to four pets per person”
Walton County, FL	“Pet-friendly shelters are first-come, first served but no pre-registration is required”	“You must stay at the shelter with your pet at all times”	“Only dogs and cats are allowed at pet-friendly emergency shelters”
Palm Beach County, FL	Page carries both a first-come, first-served notice dated 10/09/2024 and, lower on the same page, “The Online Pre-Registration Form opens every May 1st”	“Owners may not shelter at the PFS with their pets”	“Equines, livestock, small barnyard animals, exotic pets, and reptiles are not accepted”

Sources, each checked August 5, 2026: Monroe County Emergency Management, Pets At Hurricane Shelters; Miami-Dade County, Pet Preparedness During a Hurricane; Walton County Sheriff’s Office, Pet-Friendly Shelter; Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control, Pet Friendly Shelter.

Look at the owner column. In two of these counties you are required to stay with your animal. In a third, the published page says you may not. A household that assumed the rule it read for one county applies in the county it evacuated to has a genuine problem at the door.

Look at the Palm Beach row again as well. Both of those statements are on the live, rendered page, one above the other. That is not a criticism of a county running a real shelter program; pages get stale everywhere. It is the reason the shelter row on your card should be a phone number and a date you confirmed it, rather than a fact you copied from a website in April.

Monroe County’s calendar-year clause is the one most likely to catch a careful household off guard. A registration you completed last August does not carry into this season. Add “re-register the pets” to whatever spring task list already holds the smoke-alarm batteries.

And species is not a detail. Three of the four counties above exclude reptiles outright or from part of their system, and the fourth does not list them at all: Palm Beach County states that reptiles “are not accepted at the Pet Friendly Shelter”, Walton County states that “Only dogs and cats are allowed at pet-friendly emergency shelters”, Monroe County takes reptiles at in-county shelters only, and Miami-Dade’s enumerated list of accepted animals does not include them. Our state pet shelter policy finder is the starting point for that lookup, and will your pet be turned away from an emergency shelter covers what actually happens at the door.

The Pharmacy Row, Scoped Honestly

The brief version of this row is: fill early, through your normal cycle, before any storm exists. The reason is that the emergency provisions that exist are conditional, attach to no fixed hour you could put on a rung of this card, and are not written about animals.

Florida is the state that publishes the clearest pair of them, and both are worth reading for what they do not cover as much as for what they do.

Section 252.358, Florida Statutes (2025), titled Emergency-preparedness prescription medication refills, requires “All health insurers, managed care organizations, and other entities that are licensed by the Office of Insurance Regulation and provide prescription medication coverage as part of a policy or contract” to waive refill time restrictions and “authorize payment to pharmacies for at least a 30-day supply of any prescription medication, regardless of the date upon which the prescription had most recently been filled by a pharmacist,” but only “if there are authorized refills remaining,” and only when the person “resides in a county that” is under a National Weather Service hurricane warning, is under a Governor’s state-of-emergency executive order, or “Has activated its emergency operations center and its emergency management plan.” Subsection (2) requires the refill to be requested within 30 days after those conditions originate, “or until such conditions are terminated by the issuing authority or no longer exist”. The sentence after it adds a route the 30 days does not close on its own: “The time period for the waiver of prescription medication refills may be extended in 15- or 30-day increments by emergency orders issued by the Office of Insurance Regulation.” The section closes with a sentence that is easy to miss and changes the answer for a lot of households: “This section does not excuse or exempt an insured or subscriber from compliance with all other terms of the policy or contract providing prescription medication coverage.” Its history note reads s. 29, ch. 2006-71; s. 20, ch. 2018-110.

Section 465.0275, Florida Statutes (2025), titled Emergency prescription refill, works on the pharmacist rather than the insurer. Subsection (2) provides that if the Governor issues an emergency order or proclamation of a state of emergency, “the pharmacist may dispense up to a 30-day supply in the areas or counties affected by the order or proclamation,” subject to five conditions, the first of which is that “The prescription is not for a medicinal drug listed in Schedule II appearing in chapter 893.” The section was most recently amended by s. 1, ch. 2024-79.

Three things follow, and none of them is “you are covered.”

First, subsection (1) lists its three conditions as alternatives, joined by “or”, not as a sequence. A hurricane warning is one of the three. The other two, a Governor’s state-of-emergency executive order and a county that “Has activated its emergency operations center and its emergency management plan”, are issued on the Governor’s schedule and the county’s schedule rather than on the National Weather Service’s 36-hour product clock. So the section carries no fixed hour at all, and a countdown card cannot place it on a rung. What it also is not, on any of the three routes, is a substitute for a buffer built in the spring: it operates only “if there are authorized refills remaining,” subsection (2) requires the refill to be requested within 30 days after the conditions begin, and the section states that it “does not excuse or exempt an insured or subscriber from compliance with all other terms of the policy or contract providing prescription medication coverage.”

Second, neither section is written about pets, and neither one says whether it reaches a prescription your veterinarian wrote. That is a question for your pharmacist and your state board of pharmacy. This site does not publish its own reading of a statute.

Third, both sections are Florida law. They tell you nothing about Louisiana, Texas, the Carolinas, or anywhere else, and other states handle this differently or not at all. If you want to know what your state does, ask your pharmacist before the season, and treat the answer as this year’s answer.

The version that works regardless of statute is the boring one, and it is already on the site: build the buffer through your ordinary refill cycle months out. Our medication refill calculator puts a date on it, and our buying-window guide explains why the pre-season purchase is the only one that reliably arrives.

If Your Storm Is Inland

Everything above assumes a coast, evacuation zones, and a road out. A household several hundred miles inland from a landfall gets the same named storm and a different problem, and the coastal instruction to leave is frequently the wrong one there. The countdown that matters inland is not keyed to evacuation phases, because there are none to look up. Our flood preparedness guide covers the hazard that actually arrives inland, and our pets and power outages guide covers the isolation that follows it.

Print It, Then Fill It In

Four things make this card worth the paper.

Write your county’s hour figures in the right-hand column, in pen, after you have called and been told them. Write your zone’s clearance time next to them. A blank column is a card that will send you looking for a phone number at the worst possible moment.

Write your own measured loading time somewhere on it. Not an estimate. The number from an actual timed run with your actual animals and your actual vehicle, which is what our drill checklist produces.

Then take the earlier of two hours, not the first one. Subtract your measured load time from whichever county phase applies to you. Then subtract your zone’s published clearance time from T-0, and subtract your load time from that as well. Your departure is whichever of those two lands earlier, and where a clearance time is published it is frequently the second one. South Carolina’s Annex C, May 2026 edition, models a Central Hurricane Region evacuation of Zones A through F at 59.2 hours with no lane reversal under 100 percent visitor occupancy and 100 percent resident compliance, which is longer than the earliest phase hour on this card. Annex C also states that its clearance times already include a response and mobilization allowance for the population it modelled, so subtracting your whole load time on that second branch overlaps that allowance a little. We do it anyway, because the annex does not publish the size of the allowance and the overlap errs early. Our how early to leave with pets page works that arithmetic all the way to a date.

Put a date on the card. Every figure above was checked on August 5, 2026, and county pages change without announcing it. A card with a date on it is a card you know to re-verify next spring, which is the difference between a plan and a piece of paper.

This card is the execution half of our hurricane pet preparedness playbook and one spoke of the broader pet emergency playbooks hub. The playbook is what you read once. This is what you follow.