Every summer, families entrust camp directors and staff to keep their children safe, challenged, and cared for. That trust is sacred. And right now, with camp season weeks away, there is no more important time to ask a critical question: If severe weather struck your camp tonight, would your team be ready?

Warnings get issued every season. What the most tragic weather outcomes often have in common is not a lack of warning. It is the gap between a warning being issued and it being received, confirmed, and acted upon. In too many cases, camp leaders assumed the tools they had were enough. There were no written evacuation plans. Alerts never reached the right person at the right time. In each of these cases, the window to act existed. What was missing was the preparation to use it.

That gap is where lives are lost, and it is often entirely preventable.

This guide exists because preparation cannot be improvised in the moment. It must be built now, before the season begins, before the first camper arrives, and before the next severe weather threat puts your response to the test. One of the most important lessons from the tragic July 4, 2025, flooding in the Texas Hill Country is that weather preparedness cannot be improvised in the moment.

Camp leaders are experts at creating meaningful, formative experiences for children. They are not meteorologists, and they should not have to be. What they need are the right tools, the right partners, and a plan that is practiced and ready long before a severe weather threat. Lives may depend on you taking the right actions when your camp faces an imminent severe weather threat this season. The time to build that plan is now.

At AccuWeather^®, we are committed to partnering with you to better protect your camps by providing forecasts and warnings with proven Superior Accuracy^TM.

Key Highlights

• Location creates weather risks: Camp settings near water, open fields, and wooded terrain increase exposure to severe weather threats.
• More advance notice saves lives: Broad, regional forecasts are insufficient. Hyperlocal, site-specific warnings often provide more advance notice.
• Planning must happen before the storm: Drills, shelter identification, and communication systems must be in place long before severe weather threatens.

What Weather Risks Does Your Camp Face?

Different weather threats require different responses, and the specific characteristics of your location must shape those responses. Here is what camp leaders need to know about each major hazard.
 

What Should Camps Do About Flash Flood Risk?

Flash flooding is one of the most dangerous hazards a camp can face. Fast-flowing water can rise quickly and often requires immediate action to save lives.

A critical and often misunderstood aspect of flash flooding, especially in areas of steep terrain, is that heavy rainfall does not need to occur at your camp location to pose a danger. A heavy rain event six to 10 miles upstream can send water rushing downstream to areas that received little rain. Camp locations in valleys, ravines, or near creeks, streams, and rivers are especially vulnerable.

Action Step:

Work with local emergency managers and professional engineers to understand the full picture of where water may flow surrounding your camp. With the help of those resources, understand where safer areas of higher elevation are located in proximity to your camp. Map your flood evacuation routes to higher ground before the season begins.

How Can Camps Stay Safer During Lightning Storms?

Lightning is a major weather risk for camps to mitigate, and it can occur more frequently at your camp than other types of weather risks. Open fields and tall trees significantly increase lightning exposure at camps. Effective lightning safety requires more advance notice than most people assume; moving campers to a safe shelter takes time, and that time must be built into your plan.

Tracking lightning within an eight-mile radius of your camp is a widely recommended threshold for initiating shelter protocols based on National Weather Service Venue Lightning Safety Best Practices. A well-executed response depends on receiving earlier warnings and having well-practiced routes and shelter locations for each part of your camp.

Action Step:

Identify the safest shelter routes for every area of your camp. Run lightning drills so staff and campers build the “muscle memory” to respond quickly and calmly.

How Should Camps Prepare for Severe Thunderstorms and Damaging Winds?

Severe thunderstorms and damaging winds threaten both people and property. Localized wind events, including microbursts, can produce wind gusts of 80 to 90 mph in a very small area while conditions just a few miles away remain calm. Damaging winds can race well ahead of the storm, even before rain or lightning arrives, catching those unprepared off guard. Hail produced by severe thunderstorms can result in serious injuries and property damage.

Because these events are highly localized, broad regional forecasts are often insufficient for camp-level decision-making. AccuWeather’s hyperlocal monitoring tools provide a more accurate and often earlier picture of the threat, on average, giving you critical additional time to act before conditions deteriorate.

Action Step:

Establish a wind threshold that triggers suspension of high-exposure activities, and confirm your monitoring tools provide hyperlocal warnings, not just regional forecasts.

What Do Camps Need to Know About Extreme Heat?

Summer heat has always been part of camp life, but the pattern is shifting. On average, heat waves are more intense, lasting longer and leaving less room to cool down overnight (recovery time) before the next hot day arrives. For campers and staff pushing through physically demanding outdoor activities, sustained exposure adds up, and the health risks amplify as an extreme heat event becomes more prolonged.

Managing heat impacts goes well beyond handing out extra water bottles and taking more frequent water breaks in the shade — which, of course, are very important. It means watching forecasts days out, knowing which parts of your property are at extra risk during extreme heat and where some relief can be found, considering devices that produce cooling mist, and having a plan that everyone understands for when to scale back or call it off entirely.

Action Step:

Before the season begins, set clear heat index thresholds for modifying or suspending outdoor activity, map shaded relief zones across camp, and train all staff to recognize the early signs of heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

How Should Camps Best Prepare For Tornadoes?

Tornadoes require a strong action plan regardless of where your camp is located. While some regions experience higher tornado frequency, no area is entirely free of the risk, as tornadoes can occur anywhere in the country with the right atmospheric conditions.

One of the most important factors in tornado safety is more advance notice. On average, AccuWeather provides 16 minutes of advance notice for tornadoes, while the government and other sources that simply pass along government-issued warnings provide only an average of eight minutes.

There are times when AccuWeather’s storm warning meteorologists issue a tornado warning up to 45 minutes in advance when other sources never issue a warning at all. Also, site-specific tornado warnings from AccuWeather, tailored to your camp's exact location, can give your team critical extra minutes to execute your plan and get campers to safety.

Action Step:

Assign every camper group a designated shelter location, post routes visibly across camp, and run tornado drills, including at least one nighttime scenario, before the season begins. Your local emergency management, public safety, and professional engineering resources need to be engaged to ensure the areas you designate as a tornado shelter are, in fact, structurally sufficient to serve in that capacity.

How Should Camps Handle Wildfire Smoke and Air Quality?

Wildfires are an increasing concern, particularly as drought conditions spread and fire seasons grow longer. Wildfire smoke lofted high in the atmosphere, carried by the jet stream, can travel thousands of miles and reach the lower atmosphere in concentrations that pose dangerous health risks even at great distances from the fire itself.

Camp leaders in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States have experienced this firsthand in recent years when smoke from wildfires in the western US and Canada significantly degraded air quality across the region. Monitoring air quality indices and having a plan to reduce outdoor activity during high-pollution periods are now essential parts of camp weather preparedness.

Action Step:

Set an AQI threshold that triggers modified or indoor programming, and monitor air quality forecasts daily during fire season, regardless of your camp’s distance from active wildfires.

Common Challenges in Camp Weather Preparedness

Publicly available forecasts are often too broad for effective camp-level decision-making. Countywide weather summaries and regional forecasts do not often reflect the specific conditions at a given camp location, and they rarely account for the localized features, terrain, proximity to water and surrounding tree cover that make a particular site more or less vulnerable.

When weather monitoring falls entirely on camp staff without adequate tools or support, the burden becomes significant, and the margin for error is smaller than it should be.

Camps also present unique logistical challenges: activities and groups are often spread across a wide area, access points may be limited, and communication between different parts of the camp can be inconsistent due to limited cell coverage.

All of these factors make earlier warnings more critical, not less, because the time needed to execute a response plan is greater. 

Overcoming the Challenges With Effective Monitoring and Communication

Effective weather monitoring for camps requires location-specific data, clearly defined protocols, and a well-prepared team that is ready to act before severe weather arrives.

The following elements are foundational to a stronger weather safety program:

• Hyperlocal monitoring: Use data tailored to your exact location, not countywide overviews. This often gives camp leaders extra time to move people to shelter.
• 24x7x365 monitoring with well-defined thresholds: Maintain constant monitoring with clear communication chains that specify who receives warnings, who makes decisions, and what triggers action. Confirmation of these warnings is crucial so that it is clear that a warning has been received and that necessary actions are being taken. AccuWeather’s customers can receive phone calls to confirm they are responding to a weather threat at any time of day or night, which often wakes up supplemental resources at a camp to notify additional stakeholders of an impending threat.
• Designated weather monitor: Assign at least one person, much like a physical security role, whose responsibility is to monitor severe weather warnings and activate your action plan. Be careful your camp doesn’t get into a situation where you do not know about a critical, life-saving weather warning until it is too late.
• Practiced plans and muscle memory: On calm days, run drills for various scenarios: nighttime evacuations, tornado shelter routes, and moving to higher ground. Work out the problems before the storm arrives.
• Resilient communication systems: Plan for power outages and lost connectivity. Consider Starlink or backup internet, two-way radios, and redundant systems that can provide additional tiers of redundancy when traditional channels fail.
• More effective communication: Ensure your plan reaches not only key staff but also parents and other important stakeholders promptly.
• Stakeholder confidence: Strong preparation addresses growing pressure from parents and insurers, and turns your safety planning into a genuine reassurance, demonstrating that your camp has taken every appropriate step to keep people safer.

AccuWeather's commitment is to ensure warnings are not just issued but received and acted upon. “We do not just send a warning and hope it gets there,” said AccuWeather Senior Vice President and Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter. “We issue a priority warning for imminent, life-threatening weather. If that warning is not confirmed within a set time, our clients can request us to launch follow-up calls and will work through a whole phone tree to make sure someone gets the message, even if it means waking someone up in the middle of the night.”

Camp is one of the most formative experiences a young person can have. The friendships, the confidence, the wonder of time spent fully immersed in nature, these are memories children carry with them for the rest of their lives. Every child should have those experiences and go home transformed, full of stories, already counting the days until next summer. But none of that is possible without a foundation of genuine safety. Weather preparedness is not a checkbox. It is one of the most essential responsibilities a camp leader carries, and the season is almost here.

Better Protect Your Camp This Season
AccuWeather For Business delivers site-specific forecasts and warnings with proven Superior Accuracy™, giving camp leaders often more advance notice and more time to keep campers safer. Explore AccuWeather Solutions for Camps: camps.accuweather.com.

Join AccuWeather's Building a Weather-Ready Camp webinar on Wednesday, April 29, at 1:00 p.m. ET. Register here.

This blog is sponsored by AccuWeather.

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Periodically, the American Camp Association (ACA) makes timely and relevant information about products and services available to its members so they can make informed decisions for their camps. However, the ACA does not endorse products, services, or companies.