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Any tips/ideas and what I can do to minimize the chance of our pits being blown around with the hurricane coming in? (minus packing them up). Up in MA where right now they're expecting a Cat 1 with winds around 75mph.

Hope everybody in Irene's path stays safe!

Pack them up. There's little you can do if hits above 75MPH that won't take a lot longer and a lot more effort than moving them inside.

Thanks! I was gonna try and find a way to strap them down, but the risk wouldn't be worth it.

If you absolutely could not store the pits, I would take everything else off (top pad, weather cover, standards, etc) and store it, then flip the mats upside down. We get a lot of windstorms here, and the buckles always break.

But I'm sure no school wants to see $10k+ worth of pits damaged, you should be able to move them temporarily to a gymnasium or auditorium.

If you're farther inland where it won't be as severe, you could try putting really heavy monster truck tires on top of your pit to hold it down. Sometimes that works for us (although half my problem is all of the buckles are broken, so the tires help keep the weather cover on).

Fortunately, most schools probably have their outdoor pits put away already.

It doesn't take hurricane force winds to wreak havoc with pits. The key step is to remove the weather cover and the top pad and then disconnect all of the pieces. The damage comes from the whole pile tumbling and twisting when it's all hooked together. Drying out the individual pieces is much easier that repairing multiple rips and tears. A few years ago our pits got blown from the D-zone of the football field and ended up against the fence separating the track from the grandstands at the 40-yard line, and that was in a 60-ish mph June wind storm in Wisconsin. Good luck to all of you in the path of Irene.