A Lowcountry storm kit for your car

Everybody around here builds a hurricane kit for the house. Almost nobody builds one for the car, and the car is what gets you out. Evacuation traffic, flooded low spots, and gas stations with bags over the pumps all hit the vehicle first. A little prep in July beats scrambling the day a storm turns toward the Lowcountry.

Start with fuel. Once a storm is named and pointed this way, keep the tank above half. Stations run dry fast on the peninsula and along Highway 17, and a half tank is the difference between leaving when you want to and leaving when you can. Same thinking applies to your phone: a charged power bank and a cable that actually works in your car are worth more than anything else on this list.

What to keep in the trunk

Water and a few days of food that does not need cooking. A real flashlight, not just your phone. A basic first-aid kit. A phone charger and a power bank. Jumper cables. A tire gauge and a plug kit if you know how to use one. Work gloves. A rain jacket. Paper copies of your insurance card and registration, because cell service gets unreliable exactly when you need to prove something. If you take medication, keep a few days of it in the bag.

Add one thing most lists skip: a printed card with the numbers you would actually call. Your insurance agent, your shop, and a local tow company. Ours is (843) 813-6335. When the power is out and your phone is at four percent, a piece of paper in the glovebox is a real backup.

Do not drive through standing water

This is the one that gets people hurt every season. King tides and heavy bands put water across roads that were dry an hour earlier, and you cannot see what the water did to the pavement underneath. A foot of moving water will move most cars. Less than that will still suck water into the intake and kill an engine that was fine a second ago.

If the road ahead is covered, turn around. If you misjudged it and the car quits in the water, do not try to restart it, because that is how a wet engine turns into a replaced engine. Get out if you can do it safely, get to higher ground, and call for a winch-out once it is safe for a truck to reach you. We pull vehicles out of flooded low spots along 17 and 174 every storm season.

If you break down during an evacuation

Shoulders are crowded, tempers are short, and traffic is moving in one direction only. Get as far right as you safely can, put your hazards on, and get everyone out of the travel lane. Then call. Tell us your location, which direction traffic is running, and whether anyone is hurt.

Be realistic about timing. When the whole coast is moving at once, every tow company in two counties is working through a line. We will give you an honest window instead of a number that sounds good on the phone, and if emergency towing is the right call we will get you off the road. That honesty matters more in a storm than any other time of year.

Move the boat before you move the car

If you have a boat, deal with it early. Everyone calls at once when a storm enters the forecast cone, and there is only so much truck and daylight to go around. We wrote a whole piece on moving your boat ahead of a storm, and the short version is simple: book early, because the people who wait end up choosing between a bad option and no option.

The same goes for equipment, trailers, and anything else parked low. Heavy transport fills up fast in the days before landfall.

After the storm

Downed lines, washed-out shoulders, and debris hide in standing water for days. Do not assume a road is fine because the sun came out. If your car sat in salt water, get it looked at before you trust it, because salt does quiet damage to brake lines and electrical connections that shows up weeks later.

We are based in Ravenel and we run through storm season, before and after. If you need a tow, a winch-out, or a boat moved, call (843) 813-6335 and you will talk to the person driving the truck.