By Long Island Senior Advisor Care Team · August 28, 2026
Late August is peak storm season on Long Island. Suffolk lets you pre-register a parent who cannot evacuate alone; Nassau does not. And the utility program families rely on explicitly does not guarantee faster power restoration.
Two questions worth answering before the next named storm
Long Island's peak storm risk arrives in the last week of August and holds through September, and it lands on a population that skews older than the state as a whole. Roughly 564,500 Nassau and Suffolk residents are 65 or older -- about 273,100 in Nassau and 291,400 in Suffolk -- and both counties' 65-plus share runs above the New York State average of 18.9%. A lot of those people live alone, in a house they have owned for forty years, with a driveway that floods and a medication that has to stay cold.
There are two questions that decide how a storm actually goes for an aging parent here, and almost nobody asks them in advance. First: does anyone official know your parent will need help getting out? Second: what happens when the power goes and stays gone?
The answers are different depending on which side of the Nassau-Suffolk line the house sits on, and they are different again if your parent lives in a licensed facility instead of at home. None of this is intuitive, and most of it cannot be arranged on the day of the storm. Below is what actually exists, what does not exist, and what to do about the gap.
Suffolk County has a registry. Nassau County does not.
If your parent lives in Suffolk, they can be entered in advance into the Suffolk County Emergency Preparedness Registry, which the county's Office of Emergency Management runs through the Smart911 platform. It is meant for exactly the person you are worried about: someone who would have difficulty getting to safety with family or friends, or reaching a public shelter, during an evacuation. The registration record can carry disabilities and special medical conditions, so responders are not learning about the oxygen concentrator for the first time on the doorstep.
You can register online, or you can call Suffolk OEM at 631-852-4900, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and they will take the registration by phone. A family member can register on someone's behalf. If you have seen this referred to as the Joint Emergency Evacuation Program, that is the same thing under an older name -- the county now runs it as the Smart911 registry.
Nassau County has no equivalent. This is the part that surprises people, because the two counties look interchangeable from the outside. Nassau's own guidance for residents with access and functional needs does not offer a registration mechanism at all -- it tells residents to build a personal support network, arrange backup power directly with their oxygen supplier, and work out an evacuation plan with their home health aide. It also carries a sentence worth reading twice: most shelters will not have generator power, and access-and-functional-needs shelters have limited space.
So for a parent in Freeport, Long Beach, or anywhere else in Nassau, the plan has to be built privately, by you, in advance. Nassau's Office of Emergency Management publishes preparedness guidance and can be reached at 516-573-0636. That we found no county registry does not mean an individual village or town has not started its own list; it is worth one phone call to the village hall if your parent is in an incorporated village.
Knowing the zone is not the same as knowing the flood map
Suffolk publishes a Storm Surge Zone interactive map through its Office of Emergency Management, within the Department of Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services, and brands it "Know Your Zone." You put in the address and it returns the surge zone. The useful thing about the Suffolk map is what it shows on the North Shore: surge zones exist along both shores, between the forks, and around the inland bays -- not just on the ocean-facing South Shore where people expect them. A house in Northport or on a creek in Riverhead can sit in a surge zone that its owner has never thought about.
Nassau's tooling works differently. The county's emergency management pages link a flood zone and hurricane evacuation map viewer, along with evacuation route and shelter pages and a tidal surge map, but there is no Nassau-branded address-lookup tool equivalent to Suffolk's. Check the county map, and if the answer is ambiguous, call OEM rather than guessing.
One distinction that trips up families every year: a FEMA flood zone and an evacuation zone are not the same thing and are not built for the same purpose. A flood zone drives insurance and building requirements. An evacuation zone drives whether someone is told to leave. A house can carry no flood insurance requirement and still sit somewhere a county would order evacuated.
While you are on the county sites, sign your parent -- and yourself -- up for alerts. Suffolk runs SuffolkAlert through its OEM. Nassau uses NY-Alert plus its own Notify Me subscription lists, including an emergency alerts list. Register your own cell number too, not just your parent's landline, since a landline is useless to a daughter in Garden City trying to find out whether Bay Shore was told to go.
The PSEG Long Island Critical Care Program does not do what most families think it does
Nearly every family with a parent on electric medical equipment eventually hears about PSEG Long Island's Critical Care Program, and nearly every family misunderstands it. Enrollment requires a medical certificate from a doctor, local board of health, nurse practitioner or physician assistant, on the provider's stationery with a New York license number, and it has to be re-verified annually. You enroll by calling 1-800-490-0025.
Here is the part that matters, in PSEG Long Island's own words: the company cannot guarantee priority power restoration, and each customer is responsible for making alternative arrangements for medical needs during an outage. What enrollment actually buys is communication -- a pre-storm reminder call and additional outreach during a major event. It does not buy a faster truck. Planning as though it does is how families end up driving a father with an oxygen concentrator around Bay Shore at 11 p.m. looking for a working outlet.
The qualifying-equipment list is also narrower than people assume. PSEG Long Island names oxygen concentrators, respirators and ventilators, positive pressure and cuirass and tank-type and rocking-bed respirators, hemodialysis machines, IV feeding and IV medical infusion machines, suction machines, and infant apnea monitors. What is expressly not counted as life support: CPAP, BiPAP, APAP and VPAP sleep apnea machines for anyone over six months old, nebulizers, oxygen used as needed rather than continuously, pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, spinal cord stimulators, personal emergency alert devices, electric beds and air mattresses, electric lifts, electric wheelchairs, air conditioning, and refrigerated medication.
Read that exclusion list again with your parent in mind. A ninety-year-old in Massapequa who uses a CPAP, keeps insulin in the refrigerator, and cannot get out of a power-dead electric bed does not qualify for the program -- and is in real trouble at hour thirty of an outage. That person needs a physical plan: a charged backup, a cooler and ice packs staged before the storm, and a named house to go to. One more housekeeping note -- some county pages still list an old LIPA-era number, (800) 490-0075, for this program. Use 1-800-490-0025.
The shutoff protection people confuse it with is a different thing entirely
There is a second, genuinely strong protection in New York, and it gets mixed up with the storm program constantly. Under the Home Energy Fair Practices Act, at 16 NYCRR Part 11, section 11.5, no utility may terminate, disconnect, suspend or refuse to restore residential service where a medical emergency certified by a medical doctor or local board of health exists.
The initial certification runs 30 days. It can be renewed for another 30, or 60 where the condition is certified as chronic, and renewal requires showing an inability to pay. Where someone depends on utility service to run a life-sustaining device, the certification stays effective until the Public Service Commission or its designee ends it, as long as inability to pay is re-demonstrated at least quarterly. The utility has to keep a special file, flag the meter, and give the PSC fifteen days' written notice before terminating such a customer.
But notice what this is: a protection against shutoff for nonpayment. It is not storm-restoration priority, it does not keep the lights on during an outage, and it does not erase the bill. If your parent is behind on the electric bill and on a ventilator, this rule is the one that matters. If a nor'easter takes the line down on their street, it does nothing at all.
Both of these are worth setting up now, in the calm, because both require a clinician's signature and neither can be produced at 2 a.m. with a storm offshore.
If your parent lives in a licensed facility, ask to see the evacuation plan by name
Adult care facilities in New York -- adult homes, enriched housing programs, and the assisted living residences layered on top of them -- must have a written disaster and emergency plan approved by the Department of Health under 18 NYCRR sections 487.12 and 488.12, with parallel requirements at 10 NYCRR 1001.14 for assisted living residences. This is not a binder of generic language. The Department's guidance to administrators, DAL 15-13, spells out what has to be in it, and it is unusually specific.
The plan is required to name the residents who need assistance and their room numbers, the type of assistance each one needs including equipment, the number of staff required to move that resident, staff assignments by shift, the immediate and long-term designated safe locations, procedures for residents who are chair-fast or bed-fast or cannot manage stairs, procedures and equipment for moving residents when power loss takes out the elevators, each resident's transportation needs down to whether they require an ambulance or ambulette, and who -- by title -- decides to call a partial or full evacuation.
The Department also tells operators to weigh evacuation capability at the pre-admission interview: whether the facility can safely meet an applicant's evacuation needs alongside everyone else's is supposed to be part of the admission decision. It flags cognition explicitly, noting that Special Needs Assisted Living Residences and other communities admit residents with dementia who may need significant guidance to evacuate. If you are touring for memory care, ask how many staff are on overnight and what the plan says about moving residents who will not follow direction under stress.
Drills are required too: residents participate in a fire drill at least once each calendar quarter, at least one drill every twelve months includes total evacuation, and at least annually the local fire authorities or department staff observe a drill residents take part in. So the question on a tour is not "do you have an emergency plan." It is: when was your last full-evacuation drill, who observed it, and can you show me the section of the plan that describes my mother specifically? That is a fair question about a document the state already requires. It belongs in the same conversation as reading the admission agreement before you sign.
What to actually do this week
Look up the surge zone for the address, on the Suffolk interactive map or the Nassau county map. Write the answer down where a sibling can find it.
If the house is in Suffolk and your parent would need help evacuating, call 631-852-4900 and get them on the preparedness registry. If the house is in Nassau, accept that you are the registry -- name three neighbors, one out-of-zone relative with a spare room, and confirm each of them knows they are on the list.
Call 1-800-490-0025 about the Critical Care Program if the equipment qualifies, and if it does not, build the outage plan around that fact rather than around hope. Ask the pharmacy now what happens to refrigerated medication after eight hours without power. Fill the car. Get a paper list of medications and doses into your parent's wallet, because a portal login is worthless in a shelter.
And make one call you may not have thought of. Nassau County's Office for the Aging (516-227-8900) and the Suffolk County Office for the Aging (631-853-8200) are separate agencies with separate programs, and each is a NY Connects access point. If your parent is already receiving home-delivered meals or case management, ask that agency directly what happens to that service during a storm -- the answer is not the same across the county line. If your concern is about how a facility handled a storm, the Long-Term Care Ombudsman covering Suffolk is at 631-470-6755 and Nassau at 516-466-9718, and the state's Long Island regional office takes facility complaints at 631-851-3098.
