The most remarkable thing about this six-page special section on Hurricane Irma is that there are no dramatic photos of catastrophic damage.
We’re really happy about that! We’ve got great photographers, and if there had been scenes of devastation on our island, you’d be seeing those photos here.
But we got very lucky.
While Hurricane Irma caused horrendous damage to Caribbean islands and in the Florida Keys, the storm caused far less destruction here than Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004, or Hurricane Matthew, which passed just off our coast last year.
As it turned out, the outer bands of Irma that swirled across our area, bringing hours of gusty winds and torrential rains, caused greater damage both in St. Lucie County to our south and Brevard County to our north.
That’s not to say the storm did not affect us. With gusts that peaked at near-hurricane-force 68 miles an hour, Irma toppled light poles on the 17th Street bridge, felled trees, and downed power lines, leaving 80 percent of our homes in the dark.
The angry seas stripped sand from the island’s beaches and wiped out hundreds of turtle nests, and the 14 inches of rain recorded here overflowed swales and caused minor flash flooding in a number of locations.
But Irma did not wreak anything like the damage to docks on this side of the Intracoastal – in the Moorings, John’s Island, and along Ampersand Beach – caused by Hurricane Matthew. And unlike 2004, driving the length of 32963, from the Sebastian Inlet to Round Island Park in the days after the storm, there was nary a blue tarp to be seen.
Our staff photographers, Gordon Radford and Denise Ritchey, put a few hundred miles on their cars before, during and after the storm, and as these photos show, our island largely was spared. We were lucky indeed.

Milton Benjamin, Publisher