About this handbook
The Hollywood Flood & Storm Guide is a homeowner reference on one narrow subject: what storm, rain and canal flooding does to houses in Hollywood, Florida, and what to do about it before, during and after. It deliberately stays out of the beachfront-condo world and the plumbing-leak world — those are different problems with different playbooks — and it stays close to the sources listed below instead of repeating industry folklore.
How the pages are put together
Every guide on this site starts from public, authoritative material: FEMA's flood recovery and home-protection publications, the National Hurricane Center's storm surge and preparedness resources, Ready.gov's flood and hurricane pages, the IICRC S500 standard that governs professional water damage restoration (and its companion S520 for mold), and Broward County's own flood and hurricane resources for the local layer — canal behavior, evacuation zones, debris and drainage programs.
That source material is then localized. National guidance assumes a generic house; Hollywood has concrete-block construction on slabs, a water table close to the surface, a canal network that doubles as the drainage system, and a wet season that pre-soaks the ground before hurricane season peaks. Where we adapt a general recommendation to those conditions, we say what is general and what is local. Figures are kept honest in the same way: the only numbers on this site presented as data are published ones, attributed where they appear — the cost page, for instance, uses HomeAdvisor's 2025 national benchmarks explicitly labelled as benchmarks, never as this company's prices. Nothing here invents statistics, response times, review counts or credentials.
How this site handles corrections
Guidance changes: FEMA revises its homeowner publications, the Hurricane Center updates its surge products, and Broward County adjusts programs after each significant storm. Pages here are reviewed against their sources, and where a recommendation depends on a specific source document, the page names it so a reader can check the original. Local details — canal names, the June-to-November season, the construction types described — reflect Hollywood as it is, not a generic coastal city with the name swapped in, and any local detail a reader believes is wrong is worth flagging through the company line below.
Who publishes it, and why
This handbook is published by Water Damage Hollywood Florida, a locally owned restoration company at 1950 Grant St, Hollywood, FL 33020, reachable 24/7 at (954) 872-0362. The company works to IICRC S500 (water) and S520 (mold) standards, runs thermal imaging and moisture mapping on every job, and keeps daily moisture logs with dated photos for insurers — practices this guide describes because they are the practices the documentation-first approach depends on. The site exists because flooded homeowners make their most expensive decisions in the first 48 hours, usually with the least information; a clear, source-based handbook is the company's way of putting that information in their hands before the water arrives, whether or not they ever become a customer.
What this site is not
It is not emergency guidance — in an emergency, call 911 and follow City of Hollywood and Broward County instructions. It is not insurance, legal or engineering advice, and it is not a substitute for an on-site inspection: flood behavior varies street by street, and a moisture problem inside a specific wall can only be settled by measuring that wall. If you spot an error, or a source that has been updated, we would rather hear about it than leave it standing — corrections keep a handbook honest, and honest is the entire point. Start anywhere: the cleanup guide is the spine, and the readiness checklist is the homework.
Principal sources: FEMA (fema.gov) flood and mitigation publications; NOAA National Hurricane Center (nhc.noaa.gov); Ready.gov (ready.gov/floods, /hurricanes); IICRC S500 and S520 standards; Broward County flood protection and hurricane resources (broward.org).