(OOC: This is based on the Hurricane Phoenix scenario, an overview of which can be found on YouTube.)
Howdy.
As everyone here knows, Monday marks the 31st anniversary of one of the worst hurricane disasters Florida has ever experienced. It was on that date that Hurricane Gilbert, after a turn to the northeast caused by a high-pressure system over Texas and Mexico, hit Tarpon Springs, Florida, as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour (and gusts to 220 miles per hour), a pressure of 880 millibars (or 25.98 inches), also breaking the low pressure record at landfall set by the Labor Day Hurricane (which was a storm that had also hit Florida as a Category 5, and had affected the Tampa Bay area, interestingly enough), and a storm surge of up to 26 feet that hit Tampa Bay (in particular) hard, though there would be lesser damage along the whole of Florida's west coast.
To his credit, as soon as the forecast track for Gilbert began affecting west Florida, Governor Bob Martinez (along with Senator Bob Graham and other Florida officials), was urging people to leave, and hundreds of thousands of people heeded evacuation orders (many had seen what Gilbert had done to Jamaica and the Caymans, and weren't about to take chances), but many did not. Many people who did not were among the 672 people killed in Florida, along with the thousands injured. The death toll would make this the second-deadliest hurricane to hit Florida (the first was the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928). After hitting Tampa Bay, Gilbert would eventually emerge into the Atlantic Ocean at St. Augustine, Florida, and would avoid land for the rest of its lifespan, before dissipating in the northern Atlantic on September 23rd.
In addition to the death toll, there were also over $30 billion in property damage, making this (at the time) the costliest hurricane to hit Florida; among those affected, in addition to Tampa Bay, were many areas of north central Florida, including Orlando and Ocala. Governor Martinez's response to Gilbert is widely believed to be one of the reasons he lost the 1990 governor's race to Lawton Chiles (though he might have lost anyway, even without Gilbert). President Reagan, to his credit, immediately sent aid to the hardest-hit areas as soon as the scale of the disaster became known, which undoubtedly helped his vice-president, George H.W. Bush, win election in November (though he would lose in part due to his mishandling of Hurricane Andrew and the struggling economy 4 years later).
So, WI Hurricane Gilbert didn't hit Tampa? One of the side effects of this was that it exposed weaknesses in Florida's hurricane preparations, which caused a reformation of said preparations, which undoubtedly helped when Hurricane Andrew would hit South Florida 4 years later. Another butterfly effect was that the destruction of Hurricane Gilbert exposed shoddy building practices in Florida, including in the Miami area which, to its credit, strengthened those codes. Many people who complained about that stopped complaining after Hurricane Andrew hit the Miami metro area in 1992...