We have towed through enough Brevard storm seasons to know how the calls arrive. Quiet all week. A rush the day before landfall of people who waited too long. Then nothing for a day while everyone hides. Then, starting the morning after, three days of the same handful of problems over and over: cars sitting in water that used to be a parking lot, cars under limbs, cars with all four tires shredded by whatever the wind put on the road.

Most of that is preventable, and the part that is not preventable gets a lot cheaper if you handle the first hour correctly. Here is what we tell our own families.

Fuel up while the pumps still work

Fill the tank when the cone first includes us, not when the track firms up. By the time the local news is showing the spaghetti models, the Wickham Road stations have lines out into the street and the ones nearest I-95 are running dry. Stations also lose power, and a station with power and no generator sells nothing.

A full tank buys you three separate things. You can leave if the call changes. You can idle the car for air conditioning and phone charging if the house loses power for a few days, which happens here routinely. And the tank itself has less empty space in it, which means less condensation sitting in your fuel for the week the car does not move.

Where you park is the whole decision

Everything else on this page is small compared to where the car sits when the wind arrives. Two threats, and they want opposite things from you.

Water first. Brevard floods in the same places every time, and locals know them: the low spots along Babcock, the streets that back up around the canals in the southwest quadrant of Palm Bay, the lots that sit below grade near the river, anywhere with a storm drain that already struggles during an ordinary August downpour. If you park in a place that puddles in a normal thunderstorm, it will be a pond after a hurricane. Move the car uphill, even if uphill in this county means four feet of difference. Four feet is the whole margin.

Trees second. Live oaks drop limbs, and the tall skinny pines that line so many Brevard lots go over whole, roots and all, when the ground is saturated. Look up before you park. If there is a large branch directly above the roof, that is a bad space regardless of how convenient it is.

The two threats fight each other, because the shady high spot under the oak is exactly the tempting one. Given the choice, we take the tree risk over the water risk every time. A dented roof is body work. A drowned electrical system is a new car. If you have a garage, use it, and if the garage is in a flood-prone spot, that changes the math again. Parking structures, where you can get to one, solve both problems at once.

One more: do not park directly against a wall, a fence, or another vehicle if you can help it. Flying debris and shifting water both do more damage when the car has nowhere to give.

Photograph the car before the storm, not after

This is the ten minutes that pays for itself. Walk around the vehicle with your phone and shoot all four corners, the roof, the interior, the odometer, and the dash with the ignition on so the mileage and any existing warning lights are in the frame. Get the tires and the windshield. Do it in daylight.

The reason is simple. After a storm, adjusters are looking at thousands of vehicles in a week and they cannot tell your pre-existing door ding from storm damage. You can, if you have a timestamped photo. It also protects you the other direction: a clear before picture makes a genuine claim move faster because nobody has to argue about what the car looked like on Tuesday.

Keep the photos somewhere besides the phone itself. Email them to yourself, or push them to a cloud folder while you still have service. Phones drown and phones break, and a photo that only lives on a dead handset helps nobody.

Evacuation traffic here is its own animal

If you are leaving the barrier island or heading out of the county entirely, understand what the roads do. I-95 northbound and southbound both stack up, and the stacking is not smooth: it is stop, roll, stop, for hours. US-1 becomes the pressure-relief valve and fills right behind it. The causeways get closed on the wind, which means the beachside window closes before the mainland window does.

Cars that would never break down on a normal commute break down in that traffic. Sitting still in the heat with the AC on maximum is the hardest thing you can ask of a cooling system, and marginal radiators, tired water pumps and worn serpentine belts all pick that moment to quit. So does an old battery, since the alternator is barely spinning at idle while every accessory pulls from it.

Two practical moves. Leave a window earlier than you think you need, because the traffic problem compounds and the last hours before a closure are the worst ones. And if your temperature gauge starts climbing while you are crawling, turn the air conditioning off and the heater on full blast. It is miserable and it pulls real heat out of the engine, and it has saved plenty of engines on that road. Get off at the next exit rather than riding it out in the lane.

If the car does quit in that mess, call early. Our trucks fight the same traffic you are in, and knowing about you sooner lets dispatch route around the worst of it instead of joining the queue.

The rule about flooded cars, and why we are rigid about it

Here is the one thing we would tattoo on the county if we could. Do not start a car that has been sitting in water. Do not crank it to see. Do not turn the key just to check the radio. Do not let your neighbor with a jump box talk you into it.

Water goes where air goes. The engine breathes through an intake that on most cars sits low in the engine bay, and once water reaches that level it fills the intake tract and then the cylinders. Water does not compress. So when the starter turns the engine over, the piston comes up against a solid column of water and something has to give, which is usually a bent connecting rod or a cracked piston. That is the difference between drying out an engine and buying a new one, and it happens in the half second it takes you to satisfy your curiosity.

The electronics are the second half of the problem. Modern vehicles run dozens of control modules, and plenty of them live low: under seats, in kick panels, behind the carpet. Salt water is far worse than fresh, because saltwater corrosion keeps eating connectors and copper for weeks after everything looks dry. Turning the system on while those circuits are wet takes damage that might have been contained and spreads it across the harness.

What you should actually do: leave the key alone, and if the water has receded and you can safely reach the hood, disconnect the negative battery terminal to take power off the system. Then look at where the waterline sits. Below the floorboards is one conversation. Up over the seat cushions or the bottom of the dash is a very different one, and that car is going on a truck no matter what anyone hopes.

How a flooded-car tow actually goes

Tell dispatch it was in water, how deep, whether it was salt or fresh, and whether anyone tried to start it. That last answer is not a trap. It changes what we tell you about where the car should go, and no one here is going to lecture you about it.

Flooded cars go on the flatbed, always. A wheel-lift drags two wheels down the road, and with water in the differential or the transmission that is added damage on top of what the storm already did. There is also a fair chance the car will not shift out of park or roll freely at all, since electronic parking brakes and shift-by-wire systems both need power that the car may not have. We winch it up the deck rather than trying to persuade it to move.

Loading takes longer than you expect, and standing water is the reason. We will not put a truck into water we cannot see the bottom of, because a washed-out edge, an open storm drain or a floating manhole cover will swallow a wheel and turn one stuck vehicle into two. Sometimes the honest answer is that we can reach you tomorrow when the water drops, and we would rather say that than roll something into a hole.

Where the car goes matters. If the vehicle is likely to be declared a loss, a storage yard clock starts running the day it lands, and the days accumulate whether or not the adjuster has looked at it. Have the destination picked before the truck arrives. Ask us and we will tell you what we know about who is open and who is already swamped. This is standard flatbed towing work for us, and we do a lot of it in the week after a storm.

Document it while the car is still on your driveway

Before we load, take a second set of photos. Get the waterline on the outside of the door, on the seat, on the door card. Photograph the carpet, the trunk floor, and anything visibly silted. If there is a debris line on the fender showing how high the water stood, that picture is worth a great deal to the adjuster’s paperwork.

Save the tow receipt with the destination written on it. Note the date and time the water came up, if you know it. Then call your insurer and let them tell you what they want next. Flood damage usually falls under a different part of a policy than collision does, but coverage varies and the only accurate answer comes from your own paperwork. Check with your insurer before you make assumptions about what is covered, and do not let anyone at a shop or a yard tell you what your policy says.

The tire carnage nobody warns you about

The day after is when we get the tire calls, and they cluster. Roofing nails, shattered fence pickets, screws out of blown-apart signage, and long shards of aluminum soffit all end up in the travel lanes, and the standing water hides every bit of it. People drive over a submerged pothole or a hidden chunk of curb and take out a sidewall.

Drive the first days after a storm like the road is unswept, because it is. Slow down, stay out of the puddles you cannot see through, and give the sweepers and the utility crews room. If you do pick something up, a nail in the tread is often a plug, while a sidewall cut or a bent rim is not repairable at the roadside. We handle plenty of both through tire changes across Brevard, and we would rather swap it where you sit than have you limp home on a flat and destroy the wheel too.

What dispatch looks like when half the county calls at once

We will be straight with you about this because pretending otherwise wastes your time. In the days after a hurricane, every towing outfit in this county is over capacity. Roads are blocked. Traffic lights are dark, which turns every big intersection into a four-way stop. Some streets are impassable and our drivers find that out by driving down them. A tow that takes forty minutes in normal weather can take three hours.

So we triage, and we will tell you where you fall in it. Anyone in danger, blocking a lane, or stranded with kids or an elderly passenger goes first. Vehicles that are creating a hazard for other people go next. A flooded car sitting safely in your own driveway is real and it matters, and it is also going to wait, because it is not going to get any more flooded while it waits.

What we will not do is give you a made-up arrival time to end the phone call pleasantly. If we say four hours we mean four hours, and if the answer is tomorrow morning we will say tomorrow morning. You deserve to plan around a real number. When the phones are stacked, the fastest way to get in the queue is often to send the details to dispatch in writing, since a written message with your address and the vehicle sitting in it does not require anyone to be free to answer a call.

The week you get back to normal

Once the water is gone and the power is back, a few loose ends. If your car sat unused for a week, it may not start, and that is usually a discharged battery rather than a disaster. If it sat in shade under wet leaves, check the cowl vents at the base of the windshield, since clogged drains there put water into the passenger footwell and mimic a flooded car. If the car went through even a few inches of standing water on the way somewhere, listen for new noises from the brakes for a couple of days as the rotors clean up.

And if a limb came down on the roof or the car needs to move from a lot it should not still be sitting in, that is ordinary work for us. We cover Palm Bay, Melbourne, and the rest of our Brevard County service areas around the clock, storm or no storm. Call (321) 728-1869, or reach dispatch in writing if it can wait until morning.