Before the First Named Storm: An August Readiness Plan for Multi-Site Teams

On 1 September, the Met Office, Met Éireann and the Dutch met service KNMI will publish the storm-name list for the 2026/27 season, as they do at the start of every meteorological autumn. Last season the list was published on 1 September 2025 — and Storm Amy, the season's first named storm, arrived exactly one month later, on 1 October. For operations teams responsible for a portfolio of sites, that gap is the entire preparation window. Which is why serious storm season preparation happens in August, while the weather is quiet, contractors are available, and nobody is making decisions under pressure.

The problem: the season does not wait for you to be ready

If you manage facilities, assets or risk across ten, fifty or two hundred sites, you already know the awkward truth about autumn: the first named storm is usually the one that finds the gaps. The out-of-date contact number for the site in Carlisle. The gully that has been quietly filling with leaves since March. The distribution centre that was added to the portfolio in June and never made it onto the flood monitoring list.

None of these gaps is expensive to close in August. All of them are expensive to discover in October, when an amber warning is in force, the switchboard is busy and your regional managers are improvising.

The 2025/26 season made the point with unusual speed. Storm Amy was, according to the Met Office, record-breaking: an air pressure of 947.9 hPa recorded at Baltasound, Shetland provisionally set a new UK lowest-pressure record for October, and Northern Ireland provisionally recorded its strongest October gust on record at 92 mph. SEPA's Scottish Flood Forecast warned of significant river and coastal flooding across western and central Scotland, and localised property flooding was reported in the west of the country. Tens of thousands of customers lost power across Scotland, with Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks reporting more than 80,000 households reconnected in the days that followed.

That was week five of the season. Any site-level weakness that existed in August was still there when Amy arrived — there simply had not been time to fix it.

The deeper issue: compressed timelines and distributed exposure

Two things make the early season particularly unforgiving for multi-site teams.

The timeline is shorter than it feels. The interval between "quiet August" and "first major event" has repeatedly been a matter of weeks, not months. After Amy in early October 2025, mid-November brought Storm Claudia, which caused severe flooding in south-east Wales. Natural Resources Wales issued three severe flood warnings — the "danger to life" category — on the River Monnow and a fourth on the River Wye at Monmouth, and South Wales Fire and Rescue Service declared a major incident as much of Monmouth town centre flooded. River levels on the Monnow exceeded those recorded during Storm Dennis in 2020, according to NRW and BBC reporting. The human cost in Monmouth — evacuated residents, ruined homes and businesses, a long clean-up — is a sobering reminder that flood readiness is ultimately about people and livelihoods, not just asset registers. For a portfolio operator, the operational lesson is that record-breaking conditions can arrive at any individual site with little regard for what previous seasons did there.

Exposure is broader than most registers assume. The Environment Agency's updated National Flood Risk Assessment, published in December 2024, found that 6.3 million properties in England are in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water — and around 4.6 million of those are at risk from surface water alone, the flash flooding that occurs when drainage is overwhelmed. The same assessment projects the total could reach around 8 million properties by mid-century. Surface water risk matters enormously for commercial portfolios, because it is exactly the risk that does not show up when someone checked the river map five years ago and concluded the site was fine.

Multiply that across a portfolio spanning England, Wales and Scotland and you also inherit an administrative problem: three agencies (EA, NRW, SEPA), three warning services, three data feeds, and — for teams using manual methods — three government websites to check per site, per day, once the season gets going. That workload is precisely why coverage gaps persist: nobody audits a process that is already painful to run.

The good news: every one of these weaknesses can be found and fixed before the first name on the list is used. Here is a concrete plan for the four weeks that remain.

A week-by-week storm season preparation plan

Week 1 (w/c 24 August): review thresholds and triggers

Before touching hardware or contact lists, decide — in writing — what will trigger action at each site this season.

• Reconfirm which warning types trigger which response. A flood alert and a flood warning are different instruments with different lead times and different expected actions; if your site teams treat them interchangeably, your escalation will either fire too often or too late. Our guide to the difference between a flood alert and a flood warning is a useful pre-season refresher to circulate.
• Review site-level thresholds. For sites with defined river-level or rainfall triggers, check they still reflect reality: has the site changed use, gained a basement server room, or lost a flood barrier since last season?
• Rank the portfolio. Not all sites carry equal exposure. Agree your top-priority sites now, so that when multiple warnings land at once — as they did across Scotland during Amy and across Wales during Claudia — nobody is deciding priorities live.

Week 2 (w/c 31 August): rebuild the contact tree and test escalation

The storm-name list will be published this week. Mark the occasion by making sure the right people can actually be reached.

• Verify every name and number. Site managers, deputies, out-of-hours keyholders, drainage contractors, sandbag suppliers, insurers. People change roles over summer; August leavers are October dead-ends.
• Test the escalation path end to end. Send a genuine test message through whatever channel you use for flood notifications and require an acknowledgement from every site. The response rate is your real coverage figure.
• Confirm decision authority. Who can authorise closing a site, moving stock off the floor, or calling in a pump crew at 02:00? If the answer varies by region, write it down per region.

This is deliberately narrower than a full flood plan review. If your underlying plan needs building or overhauling, work through our business flood plan checklist and runbook first — the pre-season plan here assumes that foundation exists and focuses on making it current.

Week 3 (w/c 7 September): physical checks — gullies, drainage, defences

With the EA's assessment showing surface water as England's largest flood risk source, the least glamorous jobs on this list may be the highest-value ones.

• Clear gullies, drains and downpipes at every site, prioritising known trouble spots and anywhere leaf fall accumulates. Book contractors now — demand rises sharply after the first wet week.
• Inspect flood barriers, non-return valves and pumps. Operate them; do not just look at them. A barrier that has not been deployed since spring is an assumption, not a defence.
• Walk the site drainage path. Where does water actually go in heavy rain? New landscaping, storage or parking arrangements can redirect flow towards doorways that were dry last winter.
• Check flood kit stock — sandbags or modern alternatives, torches, PPE — and confirm storage locations are recorded somewhere other than one person's memory.

Week 4 (w/c 14 September): audit monitoring coverage, then run a dry run

The final week is about answering one question honestly: if a warning were issued for any site in the portfolio tonight, would the right person know within minutes?

• List every site and its monitoring source. Which agency covers it (EA, NRW or SEPA)? Which flood alert areas and warning areas does it sit in? Which river, rainfall or tidal gauges are relevant?
• Find the orphans. Sites acquired mid-year, temporary facilities and recently reopened locations are the classic gaps. If a site is not on the monitoring list, it is unprotected regardless of how good the rest of your process is.
• Close the surface water blind spot. Check each site's surface water risk, not just river and coastal — the 4.6 million figure exists for a reason.
• Run a tabletop exercise. Pick one plausible scenario — a named storm bringing heavy rain to your wettest region — and walk the team through it: warning received, escalation triggered, actions taken, all-clear. An hour in September is cheap insurance against a live rehearsal in October.

Where portfolio monitoring fits

Most of the plan above is people and drains. The monitoring audit in week 4, though, is where manual methods genuinely struggle at portfolio scale. Checking three government websites separately for fifty sites is not a process anyone sustains from September to March — which is why coverage quietly erodes and orphan sites appear.

This is the problem FloodWatch was built for. It aggregates real-time flood warnings from the EA, NRW and SEPA into a single dashboard, refreshes river, rainfall and tidal data every five minutes, and monitors portfolios from 10 to 200+ sites on one screen. For the pre-season audit specifically, CSV import lets you onboard the full site list in bulk and see immediately which sites sit in which alert and warning areas — turning the week 4 exercise from a spreadsheet archaeology project into an afternoon's work. Once the season starts, change detection shows what is new since your last check, so the daily routine scales with the weather rather than with the number of browser tabs open. You can see the full capability list on our features page.

Conclusion: use the quiet month

The pattern of the 2025/26 season — a record-breaking first storm on 1 October, severe flooding in Wales within six weeks of that — is not a prediction for 2026/27. It is simply evidence that the preparation window between the September list and the first real test can be short. Threshold reviews, verified contact trees, cleared drainage and a complete monitoring picture all cost far less in August than in the middle of an amber warning, and every one of them is achievable in the four weeks ahead.

Explore how FloodWatch helps multi-site monitoring teams start the season with full portfolio coverage →