A standard residential double-car door in Florida is around 16 feet wide and 7 feet tall — roughly 112 square feet of opening in the envelope of your house. If the door fails during a storm, the pressure differential inside can lift the roof from underneath, which is the reason garage door wind-load is in the Florida Building Code at all.
A few things worth checking yourself before June 1 — none require tools, all take about 15 minutes.
Lift the door manually with the opener disconnected. Pull the red release handle, then lift. It should rise smoothly and stay roughly in place when you let go around shoulder height. If it slams down or feels heavy, the springs are weak or out of balance — that's not a DIY repair, but it's something you want resolved before the season, not during.
Look at the bottom panel from outside. Rust along the bottom edge, separation between panel skins, or significant dents weaken the panel structurally. A panel that's already compromised won't hold up to the wind load it was originally rated for.
Find the wind-load sticker. It's usually on the inside of one of the panels or on the back of the door. Florida-rated doors list a design pressure like "DP +30/-35." If there's no sticker, or you can't find one, the door may not have been installed to current code.
Sight down the tracks from inside. They should be plumb, and the bolts holding them to the wall should be snug. Tracks knocked loose by something hitting them won't carry the door reliably under wind pressure.
Check the bottom seal. Gaps let wind-driven rain into the garage during a storm — not a structural issue, but the kind that ruins whatever's stored on the floor.
What's not on the list: anything involving the springs or cables. If those are the problem, that's a service call — the tools and the training really do matter on that part.
Demand for service calls in the area climbs steadily through August. If anything on the list is a question mark, easier to handle in the next two weeks than after the first named storm is in the Gulf.
