It was a harrowing week for 32963 island residents as we awaited my namesake storm.

Watching the explosive growth of Hurricane Milton on Monday into a Category 5 storm –  a frighteningly rapid intensification only eclipsed by Wilma in 2005, said the National Hurricane Center – inevitably filled all of us with a sense of dread.

Like Milton, Wilma came up through the Gulf of Mexico to slam into Florida’s Gulf Coast, and cut a swath of damage and destruction west to east across the state before exiting into the Atlantic.

While it did not score a direct hit on Vero, the miss came close enough to revive memories of Frances and Jeanne, the two hurricanes that pounded our barrier island the previous uyear.

This is the 20th anniversary of Frances and Jeanne, and those of us here 20 years ago still remember the hot, humid weeks after those storms:  no lights or air conditioning for days for the many without electricity; the daily hunt for bottles of water, and bags of ice; the piles of debris everywhere along the roadsides; the “temporary” blue tarps that covered thousands of damaged roofs for months.

Could Milton pass close enough to Vero on its way from the Gulf to the Atlantic to cause equal or more damage?

We spent the early part of this week checking “spaghetti tracks” at six-hour intervals (the ECMWF model is said to be the best) to see precisely where Hurricane Milton was projected to enter and depart Florida.

Fortunately, by Tuesday morning, the indications were that this latest hurricane was largely going to spare us a rerun of the 2024 bad old days. 

But our hearts go out to fellow Floridians who were not as lucky.

Our thoughts and prayers are also with those taken by surprise in the Carolinas a couple of weeks ago when killer hurricane Helene waged a sneak attack. And always, the reminder – this hurricane season, already a bad one for Florida, is far from over.