Last Updated on May 31, 2026 by admin
The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1. NOAA’s outlook calls for eight to fourteen named storms. Pearl Antoine, who is sixty-seven and lives in a one-story bungalow in Pensacola, Florida, already knows the number that matters to her: four minutes and twelve seconds. That is how long it now takes her to get Lazlo into his carrier and out the front door.
It used to take her seventeen minutes. She knows because she lost a cat the last time.
What Hurricane Ian Took
Pearl’s first cat was a fawn-coated rescue named Bisquick. She had him for fourteen years. When Hurricane Ian sideswiped Pensacola in 2022, Pearl had two carriers stacked in the garage and one cat who would not come out from under the bed. The water came up the driveway. The garage flooded. Bisquick survived the storm. He did not survive the panic of the next forty-eight hours in a strange motel in Mobile. He was twelve.
Pearl, who had spent thirty-one years as a NICU nurse in a Level III neonatal unit, said this about it later: “I have held a four-pound baby for nine hours. I could not get my own cat into a box in seventeen minutes. That is the thing I am living with.”
Enter Lazlo. Enter the Saturday Drill.
Six weeks after Bisquick, Pearl drove to the Escambia County Animal Services on a Tuesday morning and walked out with a nine-year-old brown tabby with a white chest that the shelter had been holding for one hundred and twenty-eight days. His paperwork said “may not be good with sudden movement.” She named him Lazlo, after a college roommate she had loved in 1981.
The next Saturday at 9:00 a.m., she opened the Sleepypod, set a small piece of freeze-dried chicken inside, and waited. He went in. He came out. She closed the door. She opened the door. She wrote down the time: four minutes flat.
She has done this every Saturday for three years and eight months. Her twelve-year-old grandson Roy times her. He stands in the kitchen in a yellow Pensacola Beach t-shirt with the stopwatch from his middle-school track team. He does not let her cheat.
What NOAA Is Saying for 2026
The official 2026 NOAA Atlantic outlook predicts 8 to 14 named storms, with 3 to 6 forecast to become hurricanes, and 1 to 3 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher). The agency notes warmer-than-normal Atlantic ocean temperatures and developing El Niño conditions. Even in a “below-normal” season — and 2026 is forecast as such — one storm is enough.
Pearl knows. Her cousin Toffee, in Asheville, lost her own cat to Hurricane Helene in 2024. The Antoine family has now lost two cats to two storms in three years. Roy was nine years old when he started timing his grandmother’s drills. He is twelve now. He says, with the certainty of a twelve-year-old, that they are not losing a third one.
What You Can Actually Do, Today, Before Hurricane Season Starts
- One carrier per cat. Hard-sided, latched on three points if possible.
- Practice the carrier weekly — same day, same time, same treat. It becomes a piece of furniture, not a trap.
- A go-bag in the same closet as the carrier. Two weeks of food, a slim folder with the rabies certificate, microchip number, and a current photo.
- Know which evacuation shelter accepts pets. Most do not. Two phone calls today saves two hours of panic later.
Pearl’s stopwatch this past Saturday: four minutes, eleven seconds. Roy made her do it twice to be sure.
The season starts tomorrow.
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