August 29, 2005

The morning after the storm, since all cell phones weren't working because of the damaged cell towers and the central office for the phone company had been damaged. There was no communications in or out. Everyone was so anxious to get in touch with people to let them know that they were alive. But there was no way to do it. We had to do something. There had to be a way get the word out. HF radio. Long range and reliable and VERY easy to set up. I am a ground radio instructor Hey I teach HF systems and I have HF radios in my class rooms. Perfect. So a team of instructors got together and made it happen. We went down to my classroom and grabbed an RT-1446 HF radio, AM-7223 500 Watt amplifier and an antenna coupler, along with a folded dipole antenna and an antenna mast. Some of the other folks wanted do do something, so they set up us a place with a picnic table with a cover and helped string power cables and antenna cables, while we set up the equipment... We used training equipment for real world operations. It worked great!

We were fortunate to have a licensed HAM radio operator as one of our students and he sent countless emergency messages out over a period of about 4 days. Sitting at the equipment for 10-12 hours a day.

As we only had a few hours to check out the house, and they wanted us back on base well before dark so they could do a head count. Accountability thing. I grabbed a few things since it looked like we would be spending more time at the shelter than I had expected to. There were about 750 people in the shelter for the storm. Students, families, permanent party personnel, TDY students. All in 1 building. It's supposed to max out at 2100, so space wasn't that bad.

It was strange. We sat outside to stay cool at night at the shelter, and it was so deathly quiet, no cricket sounds, birds, cars, radios, planes.... nothing... Just the drone of some of the generators could be heard in the distance. And the smell was pretty bad... in the air hard to describe. People speculated on the death toll, as a lot of people stayed in their houses along the beach... which turned into death traps for them as the waves broke the houses apart in the storm. Others talked about the damage to their houses, some cried, some didn't say anything. The ones that didn't get any damage were timid about saying anything to those that lost everything. Anyway.... it was dark... real dark at night, but you could lay on the side walk and see all the stars in the sky, was nice actually.

My family and I were sleeping, eating and sitting around in my office and had been for 3 days. Yummy... MRE's. My office at least had lights, unlike some. No A.C., but we did have some fans going that were being powered by the generator. It was so hot and humid that the floors and walls were "sweating" and some people were still sleeping on the floor and it was getting funky in the shelter. We had some air beds which kept us off the floor. Man, a nice cool shower would be nice. But we had to conserve water. We were allowed to shower after the 3rd day in the shelter over at the student dorms.

On Wednesday night a miracle happened! Since the base's airfield was a priority, so relief supplies could flown in the runway had to be cleared and lights had to be on for night landings. But it was amazing to see the lights start to flicker and then they stayed on. Wow... who cared about the lights... the A.C. was back on!!!

We ended up living in the shelter for 7 days.