Seawall Hurricane and King Tide Checklist: Before the Storm and After

• Get the wall inspected if it has been more than five years, the minimum interval the American Society of Civil Engineers recommends for coastal structures. A pre-season inspection also gives you the before picture an insurer will ask for. [cumminscederberg.com]
• Walk the yard side and look for the four triggers engineers name: cracking, corrosion, rotation, and settlement or soil loss along the wall. [cumminscederberg.com]
• Check the weep holes. Clogged weep holes let water build up behind the wall after rain and high tides, and a wall that cannot drain is a wall under pressure when the surge arrives. [dalinghausconstruction.com]
• Fix small things now. Crack repair, foam injection for known voids and a cap patch are all quicker before the season than during it, when crews are booked with emergency work.
• Photograph the wall from fixed spots: the face from the dock, the cap down its length, the yard behind it, the waterline at low tide. Date them and store them off the property.
• Clear the cap and the dock of anything that becomes a battering ram in surge: loose furniture, planters, kayaks, dock boxes that are not bolted down.
• Put your city's king tide dates on the calendar. Fort Lauderdale publishes them and asks owners to keep the wall well-maintained and, if it is being overtopped, elevated to the city's current 5-foot standard. [fortlauderdale.gov]

NOAA calls a king tide a non-scientific term people often use to describe exceptionally high tides. They happen when a new or full moon lines up with the Moon's closest approach to Earth, and in South Florida they peak in the fall. [oceanservice.noaa.gov]

These perigean spring tides occur six to eight times a year, so the season is a series of multi-day windows rather than a single date. [oceanservice.noaa.gov]

Fort Lauderdale lists the 2026 peaks as September 10 to 13, September 26 to October 1, October 7 to 13, October 24 to 31, November 5 to 11, November 22 to 28 and December 24 to 25. [fortlauderdale.gov]

Hollywood publishes its own list for the August to December season. [hollywoodfl.org]

Use these windows as inspection days. Stand on the dock at peak tide and watch where the water goes: over the cap, through a joint, or up through the yard. A wall that floods every fall is losing soil every fall.

• Stay off the cap and away from the edge until you have looked at it. A wall that moved in the storm can still be moving.
• Photograph and video everything before touching anything: the yard, the cap, the face, the waterline, any holes or tilt, and where the water went, from the same fixed spots as your before photos.
• Do not backfill holes. They show where the wall is leaking, and they are the evidence an adjuster and a contractor both need.
• Notify your insurer even if you expect an exclusion. Wind damage to the cap or the dock connection may be handled differently from erosion under the wall.
• Get a licensed marine contractor to inspect above and below water. Surge scours the toe and opens joints below the waterline where you cannot see them from the dock; Langley Coastal's inspections include underwater photos and video for this reason.
• Keep emergency work reversible where possible. Sandbags, tarps over open fill and temporary shoring hold a wall through the next tide without committing you to a permanent design before the permit and the adjuster have weighed in. Keep every receipt and every photo.

Florida's environmental resource permit rules exempt the restoration of a seawall or riprap damaged or destroyed within the last year by a discrete event such as a storm, provided the work stays at the previous location or no more than 18 inches waterward of it. The same rule exempts installing batter piles, king piles or a seawall cap used exclusively to stabilize and repair a seawall, so long as they do not impede navigation. [law.cornell.edu]

The statute behind that rule exempts the restoration of seawalls at their previous locations, or upland of, or within 18 inches waterward of, their previous locations. [leg.state.fl.us]

FDEP offers a request-for-verification form so the exemption is confirmed in writing before work starts, which is what the city and the Army Corps will want to see. [floridadep.gov]

Cities still issue the local construction permit. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Holmes Beach issued more than 2,000 post-hurricane permits and ended its automatic permit-fee waiver on March 1, 2026: the local permit does not go away in a disaster. [islander.org]

The permit guide lists who reviews the application in each county.

In Fort Lauderdale, a repair that exceeds 50 percent of the wall's shoreline length or replacement value is treated as a new wall and must meet the 5-foot NAVD88 standard adopted in 2023. [waterfronttimes.com]

The City of Miami uses the same 50 percent of length or cost trigger for its elevation standard. [miami.gov]

So the question after a storm is not only what broke, but how much of the wall the repair will touch. A cap patch, tie-back replacement on a few panels, and foam injection to reseal the fill usually stay below the line; replacing panels along most of the frontage does not, and the wall comes back taller. The height rules guide has the elevation and trigger for each city we serve.

Langley Coastal Construction quotes storm work after inspection, and the report is what the building department, the adjuster and you are all working from. The sooner the toe and joints are photographed, the better the record.