In-Home Care for Fleming Island, From Eagle Harbor to Black Creek

There is no senior center on the island itself. The two closest, both run by Aging True, are a short drive up and down US 17: the Orange Park Senior Center at 414 Stowe Avenue, about 11 minutes north, and the Clayton and Mildred Revels Senior Center at 604 Walnut Street in Green Cove Springs, about 16 minutes south, which also houses Aging True’s adult day care program. Both are open weekdays for people 60 and older, serve a hot meal every weekday, and charge nothing to attend. Getting there is the hard part for a parent who has stopped driving. Companion care takes on the drives, to the senior center, the pharmacy and the doctor, and on the days in between, Alzheimer’s and dementia care at home keeps the same routines going. ElderSource, the state-designated Area Agency on Aging for Northeast Florida, is the place to start for publicly funded help; its HelpLine is 1-888-242-4464.

Our office is at Nocatee Town Center in St. Johns County, on the other side of the St. Johns River. In free-flowing traffic it is about 43 minutes from Fleming Island, north on US 17 to I-295 and east across the Buckman Bridge, or about 53 minutes south through Green Cove Springs and over the Shands Bridge on State Road 16. Fruit Cove, part of our St. Johns and Julington Creek area, is only about five and a half miles from the Fleming Island library as the crow flies, yet the drive takes about 32 minutes because the road goes around by the Buckman Bridge. That distance is why your parent’s assessment happens at their house, not ours, and why we want to hear from caregivers who live on Fleming Island and nearby: see caregiver jobs in our area.

Fleming Island has water on three sides, and Hurricane Irma showed what that means. In September 2017, Black Creek crested at a record 28.5 feet, breaking a mark of just over 24 feet set in 1923. Across the area, floodwaters, worst along Black Creek and Doctors Lake, heavily damaged or destroyed at least 450 homes and sent 900 residents to five emergency shelters, and later that month, with an astronomical tide holding the St. Johns River high, local officials were watching northern Fleming Island for more flooding. Evacuations here go by zone, and the evacuation map splits 32003 among five of them, A through E, so two houses on the island can get different orders. Ahead of Hurricane Dorian in 2019, Zones A and B were ordered to leave; for Hurricane Ian in 2022 the orders covered Zones A, B and C and the two Black Creek prong zones, and every mobile or manufactured home counts as Zone A wherever it stands. Look up your parent’s address on the Evacuation Zone Helper rather than going by the neighborhood.

Anyone whose care goes beyond the basic first aid a general shelter provides should preregister through Florida’s Special Needs Registry, as the Florida Department of Health’s local office advises. Registering helps reserve space for the people with the greatest need, but the special needs shelter has no complex medical equipment or care, and a parent who needs a caregiver’s help at home should bring that caregiver along. All of that argues for settling the plan before a storm is in the forecast. With live-in care, someone is already in the house when a watch is posted, gathering medications, chargers and paperwork and making it possible to leave early rather than at the last minute. When the plan is to stay, overnight care puts someone awake in the house through the storm, and for families who live out of town, extra hourly care shifts before and after it mean someone checks that the refrigerator is cold, the medications are dry and your parent is eating. Our phone at (904) 204-2046 is answered 24 hours a day. To see every ZIP code we cover, visit our Ponte Vedra service areas page.