2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season · June 1 – November 30
When a hurricane or tropical storm damages your home, Paul Davis responds 24/7 across Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg and Clermont — water, flood, wind and roof damage, repaired and restored from the first call to the final walkthrough. This is also your running guide to the 2026 season: how to prepare, and what every named storm could mean here.
That's what this comes down to. When a hurricane or tropical storm moves through Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg or Clermont and leaves water across your floors, a tree through the roof, or a flooded slab, Paul Davis responds 24/7. We extract the water and dry the structure before mold can take hold, repair the roof and wind damage, clean up the contamination that floodwater leaves behind, and carry the work through to a finished, restored home — documenting everything for your insurance adjuster along the way. It's full-service storm damage restoration, from the first call to the final walkthrough.
The faster that work starts, the less you lose: in our heat and humidity, mold can take hold within 24 to 48 hours, so getting a crew out quickly is the single biggest thing that separates drying a room out from tearing it out. The rest of this page helps you get ahead of that day — how to prepare before a storm is even named, what to do the moment damage occurs, and a running guide to the 2026 season so you're never caught flat-footed.
Immediate response, 24/7, across Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg and Clermont.
(352) 320-4090 — 24/7 Immediate ResponseEvery summer the same quiet gamble plays out across the towns we serve. The Atlantic hurricane season opens on the first of June, the list of names for the year is already decided, and most of us go about our lives hoping the forecast cone never swings our way. Most years, it doesn't. But "most years" has never been a plan, and the storms that have hurt our area worst were rarely the ones anyone was bracing for.
We built this Storm Center for the families and business owners of Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg, Clermont and the towns around them. It's one place to follow the 2026 season as it unfolds, to understand what a given storm could actually do here — not on the coast, here — and to know exactly what to do in the hours before a storm arrives and the hours after it moves on. We've created a page for every named storm on this year's list. As each one forms, we update its page with the real forecast and local guidance. The rest of the time, those pages do something just as useful: they explain the history behind the name, and why a storm doesn't have to be a monster to put water in your living room.
The most important thing to understand about storm risk here has very little to do with the category number scrolling across the bottom of the news. We sit roughly seventy miles from the Atlantic on one side and the Gulf on the other — far enough inland that the storm surge which guts the coastline almost never reaches us. It is easy to read that distance as safety. It is not the same thing.
What reaches us is the water that falls from above. The country around Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg and Clermont is stitched together by lakes, rivers, springs and low wet ground. Leesburg and Tavares sit right on the Harris Chain of Lakes; Clermont's neighborhoods climb the hills above their own chain of lakes; the Ocala area has Lake Weir, the spring runs, and the slow Ocklawaha; and to the south the Withlacoochee River drains the enormous, sponge-like Green Swamp. On an ordinary day that water is the reason people move here. On a bad day it is a liability. When a slow, soaking tropical system stalls over the peninsula and unloads a foot or more of rain across a day or two, the lakes rise into the yards that ring them, the rivers back up instead of draining, and the flat, sandy ground that swallows an afternoon thunderstorm without complaint simply runs out of room.
Our soils make it worse before they make it better. Much of the region sits on sand over limestone — the karst country that gives us clear springs and the occasional sinkhole. Sandy ground drains beautifully right up until it's saturated, and then the water has nowhere to go but sideways, sheeting toward the lowest slab in the neighborhood. In the planned communities around The Villages and Wildwood, stormwater is engineered into a web of retention ponds that handle the routine downpour easily and can crest in a prolonged one. The lesson underneath all of it is the same: the threat to an inland home is rarely the wind. It's flooding — slow, freshwater flooding that arrives from the sky and the ground rather than the sea.
If you want the proof, you don't have to imagine it. In August 2008 a storm named Fay crossed Florida four separate times without ever becoming a hurricane, and it dropped more rain on parts of the state than any tropical system in the record book. It is the clearest warning our area will ever get, and it's why Fay's page is the first one we built out in full.
Because we're inland, our storms tend to arrive in one of two ways. The first is the broad, sprawling system — a tropical storm or weakening hurricane that comes ashore on either coast and drags its rain bands across the interior for hours after the wind has eased. The second is the slow mover, the storm that loses its hurry over land, sits, and rains itself out on the same towns again and again. Both are about water more than wind, and both are exactly the kind of storm that floods a county nobody on the coast was watching.
We do still get wind. When Hurricane Irma raked the length of the peninsula in 2017, communities far from either shoreline lost power for days, lost trees onto roofs and fences, and dealt with the water that followed once shingles and screens were gone. Wind damage opens a house up; rain finishes the job. A branch through the roof becomes a soaked ceiling and, within a day or two in our humidity, the first colonies of mold. That chain — wind, then water, then mold — is why storm recovery here is rarely about a single trade, and why getting a crew out quickly matters so much.
The season runs six months on the calendar, but the risk is far from evenly spread across them. June and July tend to be quiet here, with the occasional homegrown system spinning up in the Gulf. The teeth of the season for Florida run from the middle of August through October, when the warm Atlantic feeds the long-tracking storms that march off the coast of Africa — the ones you watch for a week as they cross the ocean. Those, at least, announce themselves. The storms that give the least warning are the early- and late-season systems that form close to home, in the Gulf or just off the peninsula, and pull themselves together in a day or two with our area already inside the cone.
The practical version is this: don't let a calm June and July talk you out of being ready. The wettest, slowest storms have a habit of arriving in the back half of the season, when hurricane fatigue has set in and the supplies bought in May have been picked over for other things. The time to prepare is before there is anything on the map to prepare for.
Twenty-one names are set for this Atlantic season; the list skips the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z, which is why it ends at Wilfred. NOAA's outlook calls for a near- to below-normal year, which is genuinely good news — but it changes nothing about how you should prepare. It only takes one. A quiet season with a single slow storm over the wrong county is a bad year for the families in its path, and the forecast can't tell you in June which county that will be.
So we built a page for every name. Most will stay on standby and quietly never be used. The handful that form will already be here, ready to update with the live forecast the moment the National Hurricane Center names them. Fay's page is live now as our model — and three of these names carry real Florida history worth knowing.
Names per the World Meteorological Organization and NOAA National Hurricane Center 2026 Atlantic list. "FL history" marks names whose earlier storms affected Florida.
The work that saves you the most money and heartbreak happens before a storm is ever named — and the single most valuable thing you can do takes about fifteen minutes on a calm afternoon.
Photograph your home while it's whole. Walk every room with your phone, then walk the outside, and take wide shots and close-ups of the roof, the screen enclosure, the floors and the contents that matter. Those calm, dated "before" images are the backbone of any claim you might file later, because they prove what the house looked like before the water came. Save them somewhere that survives a wet phone — email them to yourself or push them to the cloud. While you're at it, photograph your insurance declarations page and your policy number, and keep them with the pictures.
Know whether you're actually covered for flood. This is the one that catches people. A standard homeowners policy in Florida generally covers wind and wind-driven rain, but flooding from rising water is usually excluded and requires a separate flood policy. If you're near the Harris Chain, along the Ocklawaha, backed up to a retention pond, or simply in a low spot that puddles in a hard rain, this is a conversation to have with your agent before the season — not after a foot of water is in the house. Flood policies also commonly carry a waiting period, so the week a storm is named is too late to start.
It's worth saying plainly, because it's the single most common surprise we see after a storm floods a home: a homeowners policy and a flood policy are two different things, and most homeowners in our area carry only the first. Homeowners insurance generally responds to wind and to wind-driven rain — a tree through the roof, shingles torn away, rain blowing in through the opening that's left. What it typically does not cover is flooding from rising water: a lake climbing into the yard, a river backing up, water sheeting across saturated ground and under the door. That damage usually falls to a separate flood policy, the kind written through the National Flood Insurance Program or a private flood insurer.
The trap is that both kinds of failure often happen in the same storm, to the same house, and a family that assumed "I have insurance" learns the distinction at the worst possible moment. You don't have to live in a mapped high-risk zone to flood — plenty of the homes that took on water in storms past had never flooded before. The fix costs nothing but a phone call: ask your agent, before the season, exactly what your policy covers and what it doesn't, and whether a flood policy makes sense for where you live. Flood coverage also commonly carries a thirty-day waiting period before it takes effect, which means the week a storm is named is far too late to start.
Once the weather clears and it's safe to move through the house, what you do in the first hours has an outsized effect on both your family's safety and the final cost of putting things back together.
Treat the house as unsafe until you've checked it. Never wade into standing water near outlets, the panel or major appliances until the power is cut at the breaker — and if you can't reach the panel safely, stay out and call for help. Watch for sagging ceilings and floors, the smell of gas, and the simple fact that floodwater is not clean water. When a storm pushes water up through the ground, over a riverbank or back through a drain, it carries sewage and contaminants with it. The industry calls that Category 3 "black water," and it's a health hazard, not a mopping job — it needs proper protective handling and disposal of anything porous it touched.
Document before you touch anything. Before you move a stick of furniture or start pulling up carpet, photograph the damage the way you photographed the house before the storm — wide shots of each room, close-ups of the worst of it, the depth the water reached on the walls, and the cause if you know it. This is the evidence your claim is built on, and once cleanup begins it can't be recreated.
Then move fast, because the clock is the enemy. Water wicks into drywall, baseboards and subfloor within minutes and keeps climbing for hours. In our humidity, mold can take hold within 24 to 48 hours — faster than most people expect. The most effective thing anyone can do to limit the damage is to get the water extracted and the structure properly drying as quickly as possible. That's the difference between drying a room out and tearing it out. Call your insurance carrier to open the claim, and call a restoration crew to begin the work — the two happen in parallel, not one after the other.
If a storm does put water in your home, it helps to know what the days that follow involve — because the order of the work is what protects both the structure and your claim. The first crew through the door isn't there to rebuild. It's there to stop the loss from getting any worse. After making the home safe, the priority is pulling out the standing water and getting the structure drying as fast as possible, with commercial air movers and dehumidifiers that move and dry far more air than any household fan or shop vacuum could. The water you can see is rarely the whole problem; moisture meters and thermal imaging find what's hiding behind baseboards, under tile and inside wall cavities, where it would otherwise sit unnoticed and feed mold for weeks.
The reason that speed matters so much comes down to mold. In our heat and humidity, a wet structure can begin growing mold within 24 to 48 hours — sometimes before the water has fully receded. A room dried out within that window is usually a room that gets cleaned and saved; a room left wet for a week is often a room that has to be torn out and rebuilt. The hours after a storm are not the time to wait and see whether things dry on their own.
Only once the structure actually reads dry does the rebuilding begin — replacing the drywall and flooring that couldn't be saved, repainting, and putting the home back the way it was. Contents are their own job: the furniture, documents and belongings that can be cleaned and restored, and an honest accounting of what can't. And running underneath all of it is the paperwork. Paul Davis crews document the loss as they go — photographs, moisture readings, and a clear scope of the damage — and hand that record to your insurance adjuster, so the claim is built on evidence rather than memory. For most families the hardest part of a flood isn't the water; it's the weeks of uncertainty that follow, which is exactly why having one team manage the drying, the rebuild and the documentation together takes so much of the weight off.
Paul Davis crews respond 24/7 across Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg, Clermont and the surrounding communities — water extraction, structural drying, roof and wind damage, and full reconstruction. We document everything for your insurance adjuster.
(352) 320-4090 — 24/7 Immediate ResponseWhen a storm does damage here, our work usually starts with water and ends with a finished room. Learn more about storm damage restoration and the specialties that come with it — hurricane damage, roof storm damage, and the water damage restoration that nearly always follows — or find your town on our service areas map. We're local to Ocala, The Villages, Leesburg and Clermont, and we answer the phone in the middle of the night because that's usually when storms make their point.
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