One year ago on Sunday, Bermuda was battered by Hurricane Fabian in the worst storm to hit the Island in at least half a century.

Four lives were lost, millions of dollars worth of damage was incurred and it took months to repair the bulk of the damage.

Fabian was a forcible reminder of nature's extraordinary power; within 24 hours, decades-old buildings and trees were damaged, if not destroyed, and there was virtually nothing that mere human beings could do about it except sit out the storm and pray.

This weekend, all residents of Bermuda should take time to think of the families of the victims of the storm. P.c. Stephen Symons, P.c. Nicole O'Connor, Gladys Saunders and Manuel Pacheco had much to live for before September 5. On Sunday, their families will have only memories of their loved ones for solace.

But there is much to be thankful for as well.

After all, it could have been much, much worse. And Bermuda comes together in times of crisis and never was that more true than after Fabian. The Island recovered more quickly than anyone could have predicted. Anyone visiting the Island today would be surprised to learn that it a hurricane had struck just 12 months ago.

Part of the reason for that lies in the fact that the Island's reefs and hills provide natural barriers to the storm surge that does such damage to less well protected places.

Bermuda's stringent building codes and planning requirements mean the Island's buildings are stronger than those in parts of the Caribbean and Florida, where mobile homes again vanished into thin air last month when Charley struck and no doubt will do so again if Hurricane Frances makes landfall.

And it would be wrong to discount the resilience of Bermudians in the face of disaster. It was perhaps predictable that the "Fabian spirit" has gradually dissipated as normal life has resumed; it would not hurt the Island if that same unity was brought to bear to solve the other problems the community faces.

Some lessons learned from Hurricane Emily in 1987 have also proved to be lasting. The Emergency Measures Organisation worked well. Weather warnings were timely and as accurate as possible. Electricity poles largely remained standing, speeding up the process of restoring power.

New lessons have been learned as well.

The Causeway is now closed when a major storm threatens. The Bermuda Regiment now puts much more focus on disaster recovery training than it did before Fabian.

But the replacement of the Causeway is still an open question, and Fabian showed how vulnerable the Airport terminal is to a major storm.

Belco also needs to consider trenching its main lines, perhaps in tandem with a Government subsidy, to enable the Island to restore power more quickly than in 2003.

The greatest tragedy is that it took four deaths to remind everyone that there is no good reason to be out of doors in the middle of a major storm.

The vulnerability of the Island to a major hurricane remains real, in spite of the precautions in place.

The damage done by a powerful and slow moving or stationary hurricane could still be extreme and here, Bermuda should consider itself lucky that Fabian was not worse.

No one should forget that Bermuda, for all of its sophistication, is a tiny coral dot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and is always vulnerable to the enormously destructive power of nature.