Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
Two days before the official start of hurricane season, Tessa Whitfield ran a drill.
She set a kitchen timer for ninety seconds, opened the front door of her brick rancher in Wilmington, North Carolina, and called her daughter from the laundry room. By the time the timer beeped, the family was in the driveway with a duffel, a binder, two bottled waters, and a seven-year-old dilute calico named Persimmon, latched into a hard-sided carrier with three working clasps and a luggage tag.
The tag read, in permanent marker:
PERSIMMON / WHITFIELD
910-555-7741
Vet: Cape Fear Animal Hospital
Daily: dental gel q12h, lysine paste AM
Three months after Hurricane Helene tore through the western half of the state in September 2024, the Whitfields had driven up to help a cousin in Asheville shovel mud out of a kitchen. The cousin’s cat — a tabby named Toffee — had not made it out of the house. The carrier had been on the top shelf of a closet. Nobody could get to the closet.
Tessa came home from that trip and bought a second carrier. Then a third. Then a luggage tag.
“I kept thinking about Toffee being up there on the shelf,” she said. “Knowing he was somewhere in the house. Not being able to find him.”
Persimmon does not love the drills. She is a sweet, opinionated cat with the long, narrow face of a dilute calico and a single white sock on her back left foot. When the timer goes off, she yowls. When the car door closes, she goes quiet. When the engine starts, she presses her forehead to the wire mesh and looks at Tessa with what Tessa describes as the most personally betrayed expression in the animal kingdom.
She has done the drill four times since April.
NOAA’s 2026 Atlantic outlook calls for an above-normal season — fourteen to twenty-one named storms, six to ten of them hurricanes. June 1 is the start. The first Atlantic basin invest of the year, a low-pressure system south of Bermuda, was already on the National Hurricane Center’s two-day map this week. It might amount to nothing. It might be Persimmon’s first named storm.
If it is, Tessa says, the carrier will be by the door, the binder will have current vet records, the harness will be on, and she will know — to the second — how long it takes to get her seven-year-old daughter, her seventy-year-old mother, and her seven-year-old cat out of the house and into the Honda.
The shelter people in Wilmington and along the coast say the same thing every June. Most people don’t lose pets in hurricanes because they didn’t love them. They lose pets because they had the carrier in the attic, or in the garage, or in the back of a closet behind a stack of bins, and they had no plan.
You don’t need a fancy plan.
You need a carrier the cat will fit inside. A luggage tag with a phone number that still works. A photo on your phone, taken in the last month, that shows what the cat actually looks like. A friend or family member outside your evacuation zone who already knows the cat is coming if it has to.
And, ideally, a Tuesday afternoon in May where you set a timer and find out — before a storm tells you — how long it actually takes.
Persimmon is currently asleep on a wedge of sun on the kitchen tile. The carrier is by the front door.
The luggage tag is on. 🐾