Hurricane Season Peak: Is Your Business Ready?

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Small Business Strategy

A boutique owner in Wilmington has made it through three hurricane seasons. She has never written a plan for what to do if a storm hits. She has never backed up her sales data anywhere but the one laptop in her shop. She always figured she would deal with it if a storm ever really came for her block.

This is the time of year that bet gets tested. The Atlantic hurricane season’s climatological peak is September 10, with most activity falling between mid August and mid October. And you do not have to be on the coast to get hurt. A storm two hundred miles inland can do just as much damage as one that makes landfall on the beach.

A Quiet Season Can Still Wreck Your Street

NOAA’s most recent update, issued in August, gives 2026 a 75 percent chance of a below normal Atlantic season. That means somewhere between 7 and 13 storms all year. Only 2 to 6 of those turn into hurricanes. Two storms, Arthur and Bertha, have already formed this year, and neither became a hurricane (Haley, 2026).

That sounds mild. But a mild year for the whole ocean does not mean a mild year for you. NOAA’s own reporting has said this plainly. A below normal season does not mean there is no risk. It only takes one storm affecting a community to make it an impactful season (Haley, 2026). Disaster relief groups make the same point every year, since a quieter forecast should never be an excuse to delay getting ready (Case, 2026).

It Already Happened, Nowhere Near a Beach

You do not have to picture a worst case. North Carolina already lived through one.

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene tore through the mountains of western North Carolina. That is nowhere close to open ocean. The storm still caused an estimated 59.6 billion dollars in damage and recovery costs statewide, more than three times what Hurricane Florence cost in 2018 (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024).

Small businesses alone lost an estimated 12.4 billion dollars in revenue from the storm, on top of nearly 3 billion dollars in direct damage to their buildings and equipment (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024).

A later survey of small businesses in the CSBDF’s own recovery program, mostly in Buncombe County, found more than half reported a serious drop in revenue in the months that followed (Carolina Small Business Development Fund, 2025).

Here is the part that matters most. Almost none of those businesses had flood insurance. Only about 5 percent of households with confirmed flood damage from Helene had any flood coverage at all. Almost nobody in the mountains thought they needed it (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024). One UNC Charlotte economist explained why that makes everything worse. Normally, rebuilding after a disaster gives the local economy a boost. Without insurance, it does not. It just becomes a burden business owners carry alone (Inside UNC Charlotte, 2024).

Do Not Count on Federal Disaster Loans to Save You

A lot of owners assume that if disaster strikes, an SBA disaster loan will be there. That is true in theory. In practice, it is not always fast.

After Helene, more than 2,500 North Carolina businesses applied for SBA disaster loans to repair their buildings. As of mid December 2024, more than two months after the storm, the SBA had only managed to actually pay out loans to 11 of them. The program had run out of money and needed Congress to approve more funding before it could keep going (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024). SBA disaster loans do keep running during ordinary disruptions, even a government shutdown, but that does not mean the money always arrives quickly (NerdWallet, 2026). A business that is counting on that loan to cover next month’s rent can end up waiting a long time.

One useful thing to know here: the loan program most damaged businesses actually used after Helene, the Physical Damage Loan, has no size limit at all. Any size business can apply, so proposed changes to what counts as a “small” business, which we covered in last week’s post, The Narrowing Middle, would not affect eligibility for that specific loan. Those changes would matter more for the SBA’s other disaster program, Economic Injury Disaster Loans, which does require your business to qualify as small in the first place. Worth knowing which program you would actually be applying for.

The Confidence Gap Is the Real Risk

A national survey of just over 2,000 small business owners asked a simple question in March 2026. Could your business recover from a disaster? Ninety four percent said yes.

Then the survey asked who actually had a written plan. Only 31 percent did. Sixty nine percent had no plan at all. Two thirds did not even know which disasters are common where they live. Four out of five had no money set aside for one (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation & Verizon, 2026).

People feel ready. Most are not. That gap is the real risk, more than any one storm.

Standard Insurance Does Not Cover This

Here is something a lot of owners only find out the hard way. A normal business insurance policy does not cover flood damage. Not ever. You have to buy flood coverage separately, usually through the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program.

Almost nobody does. The most recent published research on this, from 2018, found that nearly every small business making under 250,000 dollars a year in revenue carried zero flood coverage (Munich Re, 2018). The average commercial flood claim, based on the most recent data available, ran about 90,000 dollars. Without a flood policy, that comes straight out of your own pocket.

And here is the part that should worry business owners who feel safe because they are not near water. Roughly 4 out of every 10 flood insurance claims come from areas that were never officially marked as high risk, according to federal flood insurance data (National Flood Insurance Program for Agents, 2021). Being outside a flood zone on a map does not mean you are actually safe.

The Payroll Cliff

The same national survey found something else worth remembering. Thirty six percent of small businesses could not make payroll past one month after a disaster hit.

That is usually what actually closes a business. Not the storm itself. The weeks after, when money has stopped coming in but the bills have not stopped going out.

The Cost Illusion

Here is a big reason so few owners plan ahead. On average, owners think getting ready for a disaster would cost about 30 percent of a year’s revenue.

Researchers actually ran the numbers. The real cost is closer to 5 percent. That is six times less than what most owners believe (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation & Verizon, 2026). If you think something costs six times more than it really does, of course you keep putting it off.

What You Can Actually Do About It

Write down a real plan. One page is enough. A plan beats guessing in the middle of an emergency.
Back up your records off site or in the cloud. Not just the one computer sitting in your building.
Check your insurance today, not after a storm. Ask specifically about flood coverage, since your regular policy almost certainly does not include it.
Do not assume you are safe just because you are outside a flood zone on a map. Four in ten flood claims come from exactly those areas.
Keep a cash reserve, even a small one. Remember the 36 percent number. A reserve is what stands between a rough month and a business that never reopens.
File for an SBA disaster loan early if a disaster is declared, but do not treat it as a guarantee. Funding can run out and require Congress to act, the same way it did after Helene, so a loan should be a backup plan, not your only plan.

The Bottom Line

You cannot control whether a storm hits your street this year. Hurricane Helene proved that a business does not have to be anywhere near the ocean to lose everything.

What you can control is whether you are ready. The real cost of getting ready is a fraction of what most owners assume. The plan that actually matters is the one you write down now, before the water starts rising, not the one you tell yourself you will get to later.

Please note: The observations and insights in this post are general in nature. The Muninn Group shares general analysis and observations in this Insights section. Specific strategic recommendations for your business require a direct engagement where your particular situation, market, competitive position, and financial reality can be assessed properly. Your first consultation is always free. The Muninn Group will not hand you a deck full of buzzwords.

Works Cited

Haley, J. (2026, August 6). Strengthening El Nino prompts NOAA to lower hurricane season forecast. WLOS. https://wlos.com/news/local/2026-atlantic-hurricane-season-outlook-noaa-below-normal-el-nino-national-oceanic-and-atmospheric-administration-tropical-storm-names-storms-major-hurricanes-atlantic-ocean-meteorologist-julia-haley

Case, J. H. (2026, June 5). 2026 hurricane season forecast points to fewer storms, but risks remain high. Team Rubicon. https://teamrubiconusa.org/?p=11280

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation & Verizon. (2026, May 5). 94% of small businesses say they could recover from a disaster, but only 31% have a plan. https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/disasters/94-of-small-businesses-say-they-could-recover-from-a-disaster-but-only-31-have-a-plan

North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management. (2024, December 13). Hurricane Helene recovery: revised damage and needs assessment. https://www.osbm.nc.gov/hurricane-helene-dna/open

Carolina Small Business Development Fund. (2025, April 10). Hurricane Helene survey: operational & financial impacts. https://www.carolinasmallbusiness.org/post/hurricane-helene-survey-operational-financial-impacts

Inside UNC Charlotte. (2024, December 11). State shows fourth year of economic growth, sees impact from Hurricane Helene. https://inside.charlotte.edu/2024/12/11/state-shows-fourth-year-of-economic-growth-sees-impact-from-hurricane-helene/

Munich Re. (2018, August 2). Lack of flood insurance could leave small businesses underwater. https://www.munichre.com/en/insights/natural-disaster-and-climate-change/flood-usa-lack-of-flood-insurance.html

National Flood Insurance Program for Agents. (2021, August). Six reasons businesses need flood insurance. [Archived]. https://agents.floodsmart.gov/articles/six-reasons-businesses-need-flood-insurance

Kriss, R., & Lauckner, S. (2026). What a government shutdown means for SBA loans. NerdWallet. https://www.nerdwallet.com/business/loans/news/government-shutdown-sba-loans

U.S. Small Business Administration. (n.d.). Physical damage loans. https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/disaster-assistance/physical-damage-loans

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Philip White is the Founder and Principal Consultant of The Muninn Group, North Carolina’s premier strategic consulting firm. He is an Economist, Political Strategist, Geopolitical Risk Analyst, and accomplished Public Speaker based in Wilmington, NC. Contact: havi@themuninngroup.com | 910-632-0431 | themuninngroup.com

Small Business Strategy

The Atlantic hurricane season’s climatological peak falls on September 10, with most seasonal activity occurring between mid August and mid October, the same general window in which small business resilience research consistently identifies the widest gap between owner confidence and actual operational preparedness. A below normal seasonal forecast, the designation NOAA assigned to 2026 in its August update, describes aggregate storm count across the full basin. It does not describe the risk borne by any individual firm, coastal or inland, for which a single landfalling or inland flooding event remains the operative variable regardless of the season’s total activity or a business’s geographic proximity to open water.

I. The 2026 Seasonal Outlook and Its Limits as a Risk Metric

NOAA’s August 2026 update raised its below normal probability to 75 percent, from 55 percent in its initial May outlook, and correspondingly narrowed its storm count forecast to 7 to 13 named storms, 2 to 6 hurricanes, and 0 to 2 major hurricanes for the full June 1 through November 30 window, citing a strengthening El Nino as the primary suppressive factor (Haley, 2026). Two named storms, Arthur and Bertha, had formed as of that update; neither developed into a hurricane. NOAA’s own reporting on the revised outlook explicitly cautions that a below normal designation does not equate to an absence of risk, since a single storm affecting a populated area is sufficient to make a season locally impactful regardless of the basin wide total (Haley, 2026). Disaster relief organizations echo this distinction annually, cautioning against equating a quieter aggregate forecast with reduced firm level vulnerability (Case, 2026). The seasonal forecast is, in this sense, a poor proxy for firm level risk exposure.

II. The Inland Case: Hurricane Helene as Empirical Counterevidence

The limitation of aggregate seasonal forecasting as a firm level risk metric is not theoretical. Hurricane Helene made landfall in September 2024 and produced catastrophic inland flooding across western North Carolina, a region with no coastal exposure, generating an estimated 59.6 billion dollars in statewide damage and recovery needs as of the state’s revised December 2024 assessment, more than three times the state’s prior disaster record of approximately 17 billion dollars set by Hurricane Florence in 2018 (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024). Of that total, the state’s own methodology attributes 12.4 billion dollars specifically to lost business revenue from disruption, separate from an estimated 2.9 billion dollars in direct damage to business structures, equipment, and vehicles. A subsequent survey of small businesses served by the Carolina Small Business Development Fund’s Western Women’s Business Center found that more than half of respondent firms reported a significant post storm revenue decline (Carolina Small Business Development Fund, 2025).

III. The Insurance Coverage Failure, Quantified at State Scale

The state’s own damage assessment provides an unusually precise measurement of the coverage gap that compounded Helene’s economic impact. Of Individual Assistance applications with FEMA verified flood damage, only 5.2 percent of households carried flood insurance of any kind; the state’s methodology, assuming a modestly higher commercial compliance rate, projects flood insurance coverage for damaged commercial structures at approximately 10.4 percent (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024). A contemporaneous analysis from UNC Charlotte’s economics faculty identified the structural consequence directly: because most western North Carolina businesses and households carried no flood coverage, historically low risk territory in the region’s own risk perception, the normal post disaster economic stimulus of insured rebuilding was constrained rather than accelerated, since uninsured losses do not generate the capital inflow that insured losses do (Inside UNC Charlotte, 2024). This state specific finding is directionally consistent with the most recent published national data on this question: a 2018 industry survey found that among commercial policyholders with annual business income below 250,000 dollars, coverage approaching zero percent carried flood insurance at all, against an average commercial flood claim of approximately 90,000 dollars recorded nationally between 2011 and 2015 (Munich Re, 2018). The coverage gap is further compounded by the fact that approximately 40 percent of flood damage claims nationally originate from properties located outside FEMA’s officially designated high risk zones, per FEMA’s own archived guidance for flood insurance agents, meaning geographic risk perception is itself an unreliable underwriting heuristic for the firms it leads to forgo coverage (National Flood Insurance Program for Agents, 2021). Both figures are the most recent published data of their kind rather than 2026 estimates, and should be read as directional rather than current market conditions.

IV. Federal Disaster Lending as an Imperfect, Not Absent, Backstop

A relevant structural nuance concerns the reliability, not merely the existence, of federal disaster lending as recourse. SBA disaster loans do continue to be issued and serviced even during a federal government shutdown, in contrast to the agency’s 7(a) and 504 lending programs, which halt entirely during a lapse in appropriations (Kriss & Lauckner, 2026). The Helene case demonstrates, however, that program continuity does not guarantee disbursement velocity, or even disbursement at all, absent sufficient appropriated funding. More than 2,500 North Carolina businesses applied for SBA Physical Damage Loans following Helene; as of December 11, 2024, more than two months after the storm, the SBA had disbursed only 344,000 dollars across 11 borrowers, with an additional 473 approved applications worth over 51 million dollars queued pending Congressional authorization of additional funding (North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, 2024). For planning purposes, SBA disaster lending is more accurately characterized as a program that continues to exist during a disruption rather than one that reliably delivers capital on a timeline compatible with a firm’s near term liquidity needs.

A relevant eligibility distinction resolves a question raised elsewhere on this site. The SBA is simultaneously tightening its lending rules while proposing to raise the revenue and employee thresholds that determine which firms qualify as “small,” changes examined in The Narrowing Middle published the prior week. Per SBA’s own program guidance, Business Physical Disaster Loans, the specific program referenced in the Helene bottleneck above, carry no size restriction whatsoever and are available to businesses of any size. Economic Injury Disaster Loans, the SBA’s other disaster program, do require the applicant to meet SBA size standards. Proposed size standard revisions would therefore have no bearing on Physical Damage Loan eligibility but would directly affect EIDL eligibility (U.S. Small Business Administration, n.d.).

V. The Documented National Preparedness Gap

A March 2026 survey of 2,005 U.S. small and medium sized business owners and decision makers, commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation in partnership with Verizon, quantifies the confidence to readiness gap directly. Sixty nine percent of respondents reported having no disaster plan at all, despite 94 percent expressing confidence their business would recover from a disaster or major disruption, a divergence the study’s authors term the optimism trap. Sixty six percent did not know which disaster types were common to their own region, and 80 percent maintained no dedicated disaster budget (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation & Verizon, 2026).

VI. The Payroll Cliff and the Cost Illusion

Two further findings from the same survey bear directly on firm survival. Thirty six percent of surveyed businesses reported an inability to meet payroll beyond one month following a disaster, a threshold the study identifies as a direct transmission mechanism from business disruption to community level economic harm. Separately, surveyed owners estimated the average cost of disaster preparedness at approximately 30 percent of annual revenue; the study’s actual cost analysis places the figure closer to 5 percent, a sixfold overestimate the researchers identify as a primary behavioral driver of underpreparation, termed the cost illusion (U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation & Verizon, 2026).

VII. The Bottom Line

The evidence, now including a direct, quantified state level case study rather than national survey data alone, converges on a specific implication: the relevant planning variable for small business owners is neither the seasonal forecast’s aggregate storm count nor geographic proximity to open water, both of which the Helene case demonstrates bear limited or near zero relationship to firm level exposure. It is the documented, quantifiable, and inexpensive set of interventions, a written continuity plan, off site data backup, verified and specifically flood inclusive insurance coverage, and a payroll reserve sized to survive delays even in federal disaster lending, that convert a plausible but geographically unpredictable event into a survivable one rather than a terminal one. At an actual preparedness cost near 5 percent of revenue rather than the 30 percent owners assume, against a flood insurance gap that left roughly 95 percent of Helene affected North Carolina households uncovered, and against a federal lending backstop that reached 11 of over 2,500 applicant businesses within its first two months, the preparedness deficit identified in this research is better characterized as a compounding set of knowledge, coverage, and planning failures than a resource constraint.