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Richard Jernigan -> RE: Now its a Hurricane (Aug. 27 2011 4:57:00)
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Todd, my very best wishes for a safe passage of Irene.
We lived on Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, DC in the 1950s when Hurricane Hazel came up the Potomac and hit DC right on the nose. Part of Dad's responsibiility was crash rescue for Bolling and Anacostia Naval Air Station, which were operational runways at the time, and Washington (now Reagan) National Airport. At the height of the storm surge I went with him as he drove to the Crash Rescue Squadron to check on things. I think he had reassigned his staff car driver to storm related duties.
There is a seawall around Bolling and Anacostia. As I remember, it's nine or ten feet high. As we approached, I could see occasional whitecaps on the Potomac breaking over the wall. At the Crash Rescue Squadron the cabins of the 42-foot boats were about to hit the roof joists of the boathouses they were in, but they didn't, quite. The boat guys were all down there, and some people from other units, fending the boats off from crashing into the sides of the slips. Some of the huge sweet gum trees in the park behind our quarters came down.
Washington made it through Hazel without major damage. I hope the same is true for Irene.
I've been through four hurricanes in Texas and three typhoons in the Pacific. When the typhoon alert hit number 3 in Manila, I decided I had better call Continental Airlines. No one answered the phone.
The announcers on the English language TV station I was watching would get so excited they would break over into Tagalog. I called a pretty girl I knew to come and translate.
"So, Richard, do you have supplies for the typhoon?"
"I'm staying at the Sheraton on Roxas Boulevard. They have 24-hour room service."
".....but, Richard..."
"I'm just kidding. I have eight cases of bottled water, four cases of Spam, 20 loaves of bread, eight heads of lettuce, four dozen tomatoes, 12 bottles of mustard, three dozen mangoes, which you peel so beautifully, two dozen big Cadbury Fruit and Nut candy bars and four liters of Martell VSOP Cognac."
"Okay, I come see you."
The balcony turned out to be protected from the wind. We sat out there, ate mangoes, drank Cognac, watched the big palm trees on the Boulevard bend over horizontal in the deluge, and placed bets whether the satellite dishes would blow off roof of the Japanese Embassy next door.
Then we retired to bed.
The next day the streets were still impassable. Pavement washed out on major thoroughfares, six-foot deep pools of water. We holed up in the hotel and ate Spam sandwiches and mangoes. The great Italian restaurant on the main floor was back open for dinner.
The next day I gave the surplus typhoon supplies to the hotel staff and left to go diving in Palau.
Tropical storms are not necessarily all bad.
Atlantic hurricanes don't have the scope to develop like Pacific typhoons. Super-Typhoon Iokwe provided us at Kwajalein with quite a spectacle, though the eye was 600 miles (1000 km) away. For three days a feeder band stood off 20 miles (32 km) or so to our west. We were in sunshine, but we could see the solid band of blue-black cloud reaching from about 10,000 feet (3 km) all the way to the stratosphere, with a curtain of torrential rain below. It reached from a hundred miles (160 km) to our south, all the way to the edgo of the storm 500 miles (800 km) to the north.
The storm surge for Iokwe lifted 100 square miles (256 square km) of ocean by 18 feet (5.5 m). Think of the energy required to lift that much ocean to the height of a two-story building! Oof!
Sixteen feet of water swept over Wake Island, destroying every building, wiping the place clean. The first reconnaissance flight revealed that the runway was littered with coral boulders the size of houses. The Air Force had to call on the Navy to haul their first clean-up crew to the island.
Since the Air Force planes have longer range than they did when they put their base on Wake, they no longer need it as a refueling station. The Air Force announced they were going to abandon the place. We had some facilities there to launch intermediate range missiles toward Kwajalein for tests. We eventually kicked in a little cash, and persuaded the Air Force to go back to Wake.
This had one bad side effect. Most of the workers at Wake were Thai. If your plane hit Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu at the same time a plane came in from Wake, it took forever to get through customs. The Thais all had big TV sets, rice cookers, video games and stuff they had bought at the PX on Wake.
RNJ
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