Hurricane Michael - U.S. Air Force Base Tyndall

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My father was based at Boca Raton Army Air Field in 1947 when the field was hit by hurricanes on September 18 and October 12. They were in the process of moving the radar school to Mississippi, and those two hits made the base unlivable.
 
Hurricane Michael - U.S. Air Force Base Tyndall

I haven’t been down there yet, but we had people in the PCB area this week hooking up generators and making some repairs for some of our commercial clients. I got a few pics back .... it’s real bad. Have to take the bucket truck down next week to start fixing shoe box fixtures that were blown off the poles. Some of the poles were uprooted entirely. One of the stores they were at had a 100’ interstate sign blown completely over; pulled the anchor bolts right out of the base.

I have a lot of friends in that area and around Mexico beach; total devastation.

We luckily ended up between a couple of bands and got no damage at all. My son goes to a magnet school a couple of towns over and the school has been closed since the storm. I think they finally got power back on a couple of days ago but still a lot of trees down. All the utility poles around his school were snapped in half.

Nearby farmers lost almost everything. They’re saying about $3 billion in crop losses just in the state of Georgia. I had my crop out already but my dad still has a few hundred acres of soybeans in the field that were spared by just a few miles.

A friend of mine in Port St Joe was sending me videos the next morning of her riding through town in a boat picking people up.

Here is a link to some satellite imagery ....

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/michael/index.html#8/30.451/-85.663

Mexico Beach is just gone. We vacation in the summer nearby at Cape San Blas and usually go to Mexico beach for a day to eat and see other friends. Looks like won’t be happening anymore for the foreseeable future.

Edit to to add.... I wanted to clarify why my friend had not evacuated. She is a school teacher and lover of all animals. She rounded up all the pets of her neighbors who evacuated and took them into her classroom at the school to keep them safe. Typical thing for her to do.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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brantmacga said:
I haven’t been down there yet, but we had people in the PCB area this week hooking up generators and making some repairs for some of our commercial clients. I got a few pics back .... it’s real bad. Have to take the bucket truck down next week to start fixing shoe box fixtures that were blown off the poles. Some of the poles were uprooted entirely. One of the stores they were at had a 100’ interstate sign blown completely over; pulled the anchor bolts right out of the base.

I have a lot of friends in that area and around Mexico beach; total devastation.

We luckily ended up between a couple of bands and got no damage at all. My son goes to a magnet school a couple of towns over and the school has been closed since the storm. I think they finally got power back on a couple of days ago but still a lot of trees down. All the utility poles around his school were snapped in half.

Nearby farmers lost almost everything. They’re saying about $3 billion in crop losses just in the state of Georgia. I had my crop out already but my dad still has a few hundred acres of soybeans in the field that were spared by just a few miles.

A friend of mine in Port St Joe was sending me videos the next morning of her riding through town in a boat picking people up.

Here is a link to some satellite imagery ....

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/michael/index.html#8/30.451/-85.663

Mexico Beach is just gone. We vacation in the summer nearby at Cape San Blas and usually go to Mexico beach for a day to eat and see other friends. Looks like won’t be happening anymore for the foreseeable future.

Edit to to add.... I wanted to clarify why my friend had not evacuated. She is a school teacher and lover of all animals. She rounded up all the pets of her neighbors who evacuated and took them into her classroom at the school to keep them safe. Typical thing for her to do.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

I have a feeling the hurricane was more powerful then they let on. The destruction looks like a CAT5 rather than a CAT4.
 
brantmacga said:
A friend of mine in Port St Joe was sending me videos the next morning of her riding through town in a boat picking people up.

Edit to to add.... I wanted to clarify why my friend had not evacuated. She is a school teacher and lover of all animals. She rounded up all the pets of her neighbors who evacuated and took them into her classroom at the school to keep them safe. Typical thing for her to do.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

Kudos to your friend.
 
mbrooke said:
I have a feeling the hurricane was more powerful then they let on. The destruction looks like a CAT5 rather than a CAT4.
Click to expand...

If you look up the development of the Saffir-Simpson scale you'll see that for Cat 5 basically nothing survives at all until you get 3-5 miles inland. So, not likely Cat 5. All the wind speeds you get in the news are chase planes or buoy drops, not surface. The surface sustained speeds are up to 30 or more MPH lower. So, it may be Cat 4 a few thousand feet up, and that's it's official designation, but that's not what you see at the ground.
 
Michael was officially only 2mph less than a Cat 5. It seems they round off to the nearest 5mph anyway, so it was basically right on the line between 4 and 5.
 
gadfly56 said:
If you look up the development of the Saffir-Simpson scale you'll see that for Cat 5 basically nothing survives at all until you get 3-5 miles inland. So, not likely Cat 5. All the wind speeds you get in the news are chase planes or buoy drops, not surface. The surface sustained speeds are up to 30 or more MPH lower. So, it may be Cat 4 a few thousand feet up, and that's it's official designation, but that's not what you see at the ground.
Click to expand...

jaggedben said:
Michael was officially only 2mph less than a Cat 5. It seems they round off to the nearest 5mph anyway, so it was basically right on the line between 4 and 5.
Click to expand...



That might probably be it.
 
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