Harvey Aftermath

[1AO_MR_GRAY]

I was talking with a reservist CO of a training command in Whiting Field about the condition of Corpus Christi after Harvey. He mentioned that if there is a significant amount of damage done to the base, it will set back pilots training there. So that would mean a term of stashing for SNAs waiting to report there. Does anyone have any information about this or heard anything?

 

[Uncle Fester]

NASCC made it through the storm with little damage.

 

[FormerRecruitingGuru]

I was talking with a reservist CO of a training command in Whiting Field about the condition of Corpus Christi after Harvey. He mentioned that if there is a significant amount of damage done to the base, it will set back pilots training there. So that would mean a term of stashing for SNAs waiting to report there. Does anyone have any information about this or heard anything?

Focus on getting through OCS and worry about the rest later.

@Uncle Fester appears to have shot down the serious damage rumor and according to the NAS FB page it matches with what Fester said.

 

[1AO_MR_GRAY]

Good to hear, thanks

 

[justheretocreep]

Good to hear, thanks

I drill out of Corpus and can say NAS-CC was not hit bad. The blunt of the damage was North of us. Just mainly road brush and power outages here. They have already begun resuming normal day to day operations as of yesterday and will more than likely be back up and running at 100% here shortly.

On the topic though, we have not even hit hurricane season yet. So though Harvey dealt little damage doesn't mean we won't get another one in the upcoming months that does. Like @RUFiO181 said worry about OCS 1st and the weather later. Being a coastal line air station they have hurricane preparedness teams in place to protect our assets in these events.

 

[Uncle Fester]

I was a Disaster Preparedness O at NASP when I was on shore duty. Which around there pretty much means hurricanes. Even with zero damage, a hurrevac shuts down the base completely for 4-5 days - they have to secure the utilities and buildings before everyone skedaddles, and it takes time to turn all that back on. CC has some mess to clean up but that's about all. If you were reporting to Wing Four in the next few weeks it might impact you.

If anything might slow down training (and again, not for the OP, but may have ripple impacts for the next few months) is relief support staging. We looked at how it'd impact P'cola if we had to support relief ops, like the base did for Katrina. Similar situation in Texas now; military airbase with nice long runways immediately down the coast from the disaster zone and didn't take much damage. P'cola looked like a Berlin Airlift reenactors' convention after Katrina.

 

[nittany03]

If anything might slow down training (and again, not for the OP, but may have ripple impacts for the next few months) is relief support staging. We looked at how it'd impact P'cola if we had to support relief ops, like the base did for Katrina. Similar situation in Texas now; military airbase with nice long runways immediately down the coast from the disaster zone and didn't take much damage. P'cola looked like a Berlin Airlift reenactors' convention after Katrina.

Meridian was the same way for Katrina. Took the crosswind runway out of service to turn it into a helo pad, mucked with the traffic patterns accordingly, tied up half the hangar for the Public Health Service (rumor was to turn into a hospital/morgue that was thankfully never needed), and half the ramp for Air Mobility Command jets. We were basically the closest airport you could base large-scale ops out of which was relatively undamaged. Made things interesting for awhile.

 

[Jim123]

Whiting got hit hard enough in 2004 to lose a lot of big trees, rip a hangar door off its rails, and flood one or two buildings (a lot of rain leaking through the roof). Some of the radar at the Pensacola airport got destroyed too so ATC had to use remote feeds from other radar sites (means separation rules change and they can't fit in as much traffic... so no practice approaches for orange and whites). Most people didn't have electricity for anything from three days to a week after the storm.

In spite of all that, and working parties to help repair home damage for squadron members who lived too close to the water, we were fully up and running again after a few weeks.

It sounds like NASCC wasn't hit any harder than that and probably less.

I will also say it was a lot of fun getting drunk in Memphis night after night during the hurrevac and watching the weather channel shenanigans/entertainment, even if the days were really boring up there.