Do you drain your pool before a hurricane? No.

Every time something spins up in the Atlantic, somebody on a neighborhood page tells everyone to drain their pool. It sounds like common sense. Less water in the pool, less water to overflow, less mess.

It's backwards. And it's the one piece of storm advice around here that can cost you the whole thing.

The water is what holds the pool down

A pool full of water is heavy. Tens of thousands of pounds heavy. That weight is the only thing keeping it in the ground.

Now take the water out and put ten inches of rain into the soil around it. Around here that isn't a hypothetical, that's a Tuesday in September. The ground saturates, the water table comes up, and all that groundwater starts pushing up against the bottom of an empty shell.

There's nothing left pushing back.

That's when a pool floats. It's called pop-up, and it doesn't mean a crack you patch. The shell lifts, the plumbing tears out of it, the electrical goes with it, and the deck breaks up around it. You don't repair that. You start over.

A full pool doesn't do this. The water inside outweighs the water outside and the shell stays exactly where you put it. Worth knowing: more concrete pools have popped out of the ground than fiberglass ones.

But won't it overflow?

Yes. Let it.

Your pool is a container built to hold water, and it can handle being filled past the top. Rain running over the coping is doing exactly what it would do if there were a patio there instead — running off across the yard. In a flood, the pool is one of the few things in your backyard that doesn't care.

There's a smaller version of this mistake too. People drop the level just below the skimmer to be safe. If the storm turns and the rain never comes, you've got a pump pulling air. A pump that runs dry burns its motor out. That's a real bill for a storm that missed you.

What to actually do before it hits

Short list. None of it involves the water.

• Shock it. Before, not after. If your yard floods you want as much chlorine in there as you can get ahead of whatever's about to wash into it.
• Pull the pump motor if the pad might flood. This is the one item worth real money. A submerged motor is a dead motor. Disconnect it, put it somewhere dry and high, and take anything else off the pad you can carry.
• Clear the pad. Get mulch, leaves and loose soil away from the equipment so water drains off it instead of pooling around it.
• Cut the branches you've been meaning to cut. Anything overhanging the pool is a projectile at 70 mph. This one protects the house more than it protects the pool.
• Furniture goes in the garage, not in the pool. This tip circulates every year and it's wrong. Chairs scratch the surface and metal furniture can stain it. Bring it inside. If there's truly nowhere, tie it down on the lee side of the house.
• Kill the breaker at the pad once the motor's out.

That's it. Then go deal with your house, which is the thing that actually matters.

If you're evacuating

Same answer, more so. Do not drain it and leave.

You might be gone a week. If the power's out nothing is circulating, and you'll come home to green water no matter what you did. That's fine. Green water is a weekend of chemicals and a filter clean. A floated shell is a rebuild.

Shock it hard on the way out, kill the breaker, take the motor if you've got time, and go.

Your pool is fifteen thousand gallons of utility water

This part is specific to how a lot of us live out here, and I've never seen it in a storm-prep article.

If you're on a well — and in Rocky Point, Burgaw and most of inland Pender, you are — then when the power goes out, your well pump stops. No power, no water. Not for drinking, not for washing, not for flushing a toilet.

Your pool is still sitting there holding fifteen or twenty thousand gallons.

It is not drinking water and nobody should treat it as any. But a five-gallon bucket poured into a toilet bowl flushes it just fine, and that is a materially different week than the alternative.

It's one more reason the answer to "should I drain it" is no. You may want that water for something other than swimming.

After it passes

Still don't drain it. This is where most pop-ups actually happen — not during the storm, after. The ground is at its most saturated the day after, which is the worst possible moment to empty a shell. If the pool is so full of mud that it genuinely has to come down, wait for the ground to dry, then take less than half, clean it, and refill. Don't take it to the bottom.

Don't turn anything on until you know the pad is dry. Water and a 240-volt circuit is not something to guess at. If the pad went under, get an electrician to it before you flip that breaker.

Get the big debris out by hand before you run the filter, or you'll destroy the pump you just went to the trouble of saving.

If you took flood water, treat the pool as contaminated. Street flooding and surge bring in sewage, fuel, and whatever was in the yard uphill from you. That's a shock, a long filter run and a full water test, not a quick vacuum. If your septic backed up in the same event, take that seriously and don't let anyone swim on optimism.

Sand. If you're on the island you may find the pool half full of it. Get it out before it goes through the pump. That's the real difference between a mainland cleanup and a Topsail one.

The part that gets decided before the pool goes in

There's one piece of this that isn't your call after the fact.

Every fiberglass pool on this coast should have a dewatering line, and it's decided before the shell ever touches the hole. It's an 8-inch pipe run down to the bottom of the excavation while it's still open, capped flush under the deck with a skimmer lid so you'd never know it was there.

What it does is give you a way to get groundwater out from under the pool. That's what makes it safe to drain one someday if you ever truly have to — you pump the sump down first, then the pool. Without it you have no way to know what's under there and no way to do anything about it.

It costs almost nothing while the hole is open. It's effectively impossible to add later without digging the pool back out of the ground.

Every pool I put in on this coast gets one. If you're getting bids, ask each builder whether theirs does — and watch how fast they answer. It's a fair question and this close to the water there's only one right answer.

If you already have a pool, go look for a skimmer lid in your deck that isn't a skimmer. That's it, if it's there.

About this season

NOAA's outlook for 2026 calls for a below-normal season: 8 to 14 named storms, 3 to 6 hurricanes, on a developing El Niño. In 2025, no hurricane made landfall on the continental United States at all — the first time that's happened in a decade.

Which is exactly why this is worth reading in July.

Quiet forecasts make people complacent, and a forecast is a count, not a map. It says nothing about whether one of them comes here. As the National Weather Service director put it in this year's outlook: "It only takes one storm to make for a very bad season."

NOAA updates the outlook in early August, right before the peak. The season runs to November 30 either way.

The short version

• Do not drain the pool. Not before, not during, not the day after.
• Shock it before the storm.
• Take the pump motor if the pad might flood.
• Furniture inside, branches down, breaker off.
• Afterward: don't power up a wet pad, don't drain into saturated ground, treat flood water as contaminated.
• On a well? That pool is your flush water.

I'm Walter. I build fiberglass pools in Hampstead and along the coast from Wilmington to Topsail Island. None of the above makes me a dime — it's just what I'd want a neighbor to know before September. If you want to talk about a pool, I'm at 910-859-6222.