As Gloucester and Mathews residents see images of the devastation that Hurricane Florence has wrought in North Carolina, they are breathing a sigh of relief that they’ve been spared a similar fate.

If some other weather system had bumped into Florence and diverted its course ever so slightly, the videos dominating the national news this week would have been of residents of Perrin and Maryus being picked up by rescue boats, of Mathews Court House languishing under a foot or more of water, of beachfront homes on Gwynn’s Island knocked off their foundations and washed into the Chesapeake Bay.

Thankfully, those scenes exist only in the imagination.

There’s no doubt, this area dodged one heck of a bullet—a monster storm that would have left its mark for years to come.

What have we learned?

First, as if we didn’t know it before, we have learned that Mother Nature is fickle. Last week, it looked as if we may have been, if not directly in the storm’s pa...