Thirty years ago this week the island learnt the most valuable lesson in self-reliance in its modern history and the Royal Bermuda Regiment came of age.

On the evening of September 24, 1987, Bermuda residents went to bed assured by weather forecasters that Hurricane Emily, which had cut a swath of destruction across the Dominican Republic as a Category 2 storm, was rapidly diminishing as it approached the island.

On a northwest track, which would bring it close to Bermuda, Emily was expected to pass the island late the next day as a blustering tropical storm.

At worst, we could expect a few heavy showers and perhaps some occasional gusts from the fading storm’s outermost bands in the early evening.

But what happened next defied almost everything that was then known about the science of meteorology.

Instead of continuing to weaken, Emily underwent what meteorologists now call an “explosive intensification”, regaining hurricane strength overnight and sweeping directly over Bermuda early on the morning of September 25 as a fiercely compact Category 1 storm.

Bermuda was caught completely off-guard.

With sustained winds of 90mph and gusts of up to 112mph, the storm tore a cruise liner from its berth alongside Front Street: as one commentator has wryly but accurately noted, only some genuinely inspired seamanship on the part of her captain prevented The Atlantic from becoming a permanent fixture on the Paget shoreline.

Emily went on to uproot hundreds of trees, rip the roofs off more than 200 houses and lift yachts out of the water and deposit them in the middle of roads.

The hurricane also spawned a string of powerful tornados, which compounded the devastation caused by high winds and tidal surges.

By the time Emily had raced across Bermuda a little more than an hour after abruptly blowing ashore here, more than $50 million in property damage had been caused and 90 per cent of the island was without electricity.

It was the single worst hurricane strike that Bermuda had sustained since 1948. A major disaster-recovery initiative was called for, with initial estimates suggesting it might take the island several months to clear roads that had become impassable with vegetation and building debris and to replace and re-string the dozens of utility poles that had snapped like so many matchsticks.

And this is when the Regiment stepped forward to fill the breach.

Commanding Officer Lieutenant-Colonel Gavin Shorto and a cadre of senior officers, Major Wendell Hollis prominent among them, were eager to extend the outfit’s role beyond its traditional ceremonial duties and as an occasional reinforcement for the Bermuda Police on internal security matters.

They wanted to develop an institution with an expanded relevance to the island it served, to make Warwick Camp an efficient, reliable and all-purpose community resource.

So the Regiment fought to take the lead in the hurricane recovery effort almost from the time it was mobilised in the hours immediately after Emily’s unexpected arrival.

“It was an idea that came up while we were sitting around at Belco [after] the hurricane,” Hollis later recalled. “The Regiment had taken over the logistics of Belco [and] we were getting these reports that the island would have to shut down for three months, things like that.

“Back then tourism was still pretty strong and we wanted to get Bermuda back to work. I felt that there was no way a country with our resources should have to wait for three months. I wanted to see what we could do.”

At the time, the Regiment was arguably better known for parading in various public ceremonies than as an organised, well-drilled militia, let alone one capable of undertaking the daunting logistical, operational and practical challenges involved in a disaster-relief exercise of this magnitude.

So, perhaps inevitably, there were calls for the government of the day to ask London for immediate emergency assistance in the form of a contingent of British troops experienced in natural-disaster response, using the local part-time soldiers in a back-up and support capacity.

But Sir John Swan, then the Premier, lined up alongside the Regiment.

He was insistent the clean-up effort remain as Bermudian in character as possible for a number of philosophical and purely pragmatic reasons — chief among them that we would have nowhere to actually house an influx of British troops, with the Regiment embodied at Warwick Camp and most of the storm-raked hotels temporarily shuttered.

So it fell to the Regiment to co-ordinate the recovery with Belco and various other public and private entities. It was just a matter of weeks, not months, before Bermuda was back on its feet — bruised, certainly, but aside from the occasional rooftop tarpaulin and the severely pruned foliage throughout the island, there were few visible signs of Emily’s early morning September rampage by Hallowe’en.

And when Sir John would later invoke “The Spirit of Emily” to describe the relatively seamless and almost entirely harmonious nature of the relief operation, it’s a spirit that owed in large measure to the sense of direction and purpose provided by the Regiment in the days and weeks after the hurricane.

This marked the beginning of the Royal Bermuda Regiment’s now well-established role in natural-disaster preparedness and relief.

Warwick Camp is now regarded as a regional leader in the field, not only providing sterling service to Bermuda during subsequent hurricane strikes, but also participating in numerous recovery operations in the Caribbean in the intervening 30 years. Just last week, of course, a contingent of 30 Regiment volunteers joined British soldiers in the Turks & Caicos Islands to assist in the massive humanitarian relief mission launched there after Category 5 Hurricane Irma inflicted catastrophic damage in the territory.

With the Regiment’s proven ability to assist Bermuda and the Caribbean in times of crisis, to provide comfort at home and to project the island’s image overseas as a stable, sophisticated, strong and reliable partner, it is clear that, even three decades on, the Spirit of Emily is alive and well and thriving at Warwick Camp.