Michael’s devastation…
My guess is that the death toll will go up, unfortunately. The property damage is clearly immense.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
My guess is that the death toll will go up, unfortunately. The property damage is clearly immense.
During my years stationed at Pensacola we experienced two hurricanes. We flew our airplanes to NAS Memphis, leaving the wives and children behind to ride out the storm. Plenty of food, bathtub and washing ,machine filled with water, and windows covered with plywood. The prep was the same as today. Fortunately, neither hurricane hit directly at Pensacola and both weakened quickly as they came over land.
This storm turned out to be a monster that didn’t weaken much as it came over land. 155 knot winds can do enormous damage. It hit Tyndall Air Force base directly. Fortunately, the base is well built, but they evacuated the families (good move!) while the pilots flew the airplanes to Wright Pat in Ohio. The recovery will take a lot of time. At times like this, it takes dogged determination and a lot of help from the rest of us.
I have a lot of family in Panama City and Panama City Beach FL. During my childhood we frequently vacationed there during October/November (took our school books with us) visiting our grandparents who moved there from Chicago in 1967. I heard our family are all well, but extensive property damage.
I lived in Melbourne, Florida for years and have been thru a few hurricanes with winds around 100 MPH. Wind drag increases as the square if the wind speed so if wind speed doubles the force of the wind on a structure quadruples. The house I lived in withstood winds of 100 MPH or so, but a wind speed of 150 MPH will destroy practically any house. That wind speed calls for reinforced concrete construction.
My family moved to Fl when I was 7 and I grew up there. 42 years later I moved back to take care of my aging parents. As this picture makes clear, the majority of the damage was caused by waves driven ashore. Wind damage is a much lesser factor. And looking at that picture, I cannot help but conclude that anyone who was living within a 1000 ft of that shore has only themselves to blame.
Living next to a dormant volcano and then playing the victim card when your ‘bet’ goes against you is the epitome of denial of personal responsibility for your choices.
Nor does the media care about the adult ‘victims’, for them its all about hyping climate change. The subtext for all the national news’ focus on weather. Nearly every night ABC has a report on the weather and hypes the hell out of it. Absent truly extreme weather events, entirely absent from the national news TV broadcasts even 20 years ago.
According to reports Tindal AFB, right in the main path of the hurricane, was pretty badly damaged, wrecked in fact, and one picture I saw shows an overturned jet fighter, while another article noted that some stealth fighters were damaged.
Please tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it a standard military precaution to fly vulnerable (and very expensive) aircraft away from bases in the likely track of a hurricane before that hurricane strikes, and to a base not threatened by that natural disaster.
Seems like someone needs to retire early, if it turns out that the commanding officer here never took such a sensible precaution and, as a result, many millions of dollars of easily preventable damage was done to these aircraft, aircraft that, from what I understand, are in way too short supply right now.
Snow on Pine: The aircraft on its back was a part of a static display of four aircraft. Three of them were still in place in a video I saw.
From the Stars and Stripes: “As of Thursday, no injuries were reported on the base, which was under a mandatory evacuation order since Tuesday. All of the operational {the operative word is OPERATIONAL} aircraft assigned to Tyndall were evacuated ahead of the storm to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Carswell Field in Texas and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.”
There were some non-operational aircraft parked in hangars that sustained some damage.
For a more complete coverage there is video and text at:
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/tyndall-afb-leveled-by-hurricane-michael-as-most-other-installations-avoid-major-damage-1.551072
J.J.–Wondered if the flipped over aircraft might have been an older static display you often see at AF/MC bases, but the caption didn’t say.