Free Hurricane Preparedness Event Comes to Port St. Lucie Tonight

With hurricane season less than six weeks away, Port St. Lucie residents have a free, walk-in opportunity tonight to learn how to protect their homes, families and finances before the first storm of 2025 forms.

A hurricane preparedness town hall is scheduled for tonight at the Port St. Lucie Botanical Gardens, 2410 SE Westmoreland Blvd., as part of a regional "Storm Ready" tour making stops across the Treasure Coast and South Florida ahead of the June 1 official start of hurricane season.

Doors open at 6 p.m. The presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

Tonight's program will cover storm preparation checklists, home insurance guidance, post-storm recovery steps and general safety protocols, officials said. A question-and-answer session will follow the main presentation.

Attendees will also have the chance to sign up as trained weather spotters — civilian volunteers who serve as ground-level observers during severe weather events, feeding real-time reports to forecasters tracking fast-moving storms.

The timing is deliberate. Meteorologists and emergency managers consistently warn that the Atlantic basin's peak threat window, August through October, arrives faster than most families expect. St. Lucie County remains in a high-risk zone for both direct landfalls and flooding from slow-moving tropical systems, according to public records from the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Tonight's Botanical Gardens stop is one of several planned events in the regional tour. Residents who cannot attend are encouraged to contact the St. Lucie County Emergency Management Division directly for preparedness resources.

For St. Lucie County's roughly 375,000 residents — many of whom moved here from inland states with little hurricane experience — tonight's session is the kind of on-ramp emergency planners say can make the difference when a storm threatens the coast.

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