Hurricane Michael scoured Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. The base had survived severe weather in the past, but Michael destroyed the livability of the quarters (ca. 600) and many of the dorms. The storm out and out destroyed the flight line and severely damaged the BX, commissary, and the elementary school.

The good news is, the families and many personnel evacuated the base and the base listed no fatalities. The evacuation kept the personnel and families safe, but couldn’t have been a picnic.

Even evacuations that were picnics, were difficult for families. I have the memory of a mid-1950s Cold War practice evacuation at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota. Enough chatter went on among the adults that even though I was only five years old, the event imprinted in my mind the word “evacuation.”

Our evacuation was supposed to get us away from ground zero in case of an attack by the Russians on the local base, a Strategic Air Command base where the B-52 bombers were stationed. Or, maybe the evacuation practice was just to convince the families that an attack would be survivable (it wouldn’t have been).

In any case, the sirens went off and the moms packed up their cars with kids and picnic baskets and headed into the Black Hills. We stayed there most of the day, us kids running amok in the woods. We returned to the base probably during local rush hour. If it wasn’t Rapid City’s actual rush hour, the return of an entire base worth of families made it that way. The reason I think the evacuation wasn’t the success it was meant to be is because I don’t remember another one and we lived at Ellsworth for another anomalous six years (Air Force reorganization; Dad’s AFSC being downgraded; he was shuffled around for ages until things sort themselves out and we were transferred like normal people).

Other, later evacuations were more drills than actual practices. The residents of the entire community would be picked up by shuttle bus and delivered to a central point for ‘processing.’ The processing consisted of having our evacuation papers checked, showing a bored clerk our computer punch cards that we’d surrender one by one during our journey back to the US so our service member could be informed of our whereabouts, and filling out emergency pay transfers so that, at some point, we’d have some money wherever we wound up.

We were lucky during our evacuations — they were practices. We went out, we came back, all our household goods were where we left them, we slept in our own beds that night. The adults in our evacuation didn’t have to gather all their necessary papers, clothing, food, and portable valuables. For us, pets (if any) were probably left home for the day.

The personnel and family members at Tyndall, as well as the surrounding civilian communities have no such comfort. Their entire lives are disrupted. They can’t even return to see what they can salvage. To make things more difficult for some of them, the pilots of the planes that were able to be relocated aren’t with their families. The ‘other parent’ in those families is now effectively a single parent. This probably also goes for the families of personnel who have returned to the base for emergency operations.

13 Tyndall AFB

Tyndall AFB, Florida — damage by Hurricane Michael. Photo: screenshot from DoD video on Facebook.

Life in a military family is always on an edge even if the moment is presently calm. You know you won’t be staying wherever you presently live. If you don’t move, then your friends do. You rarely, if ever, live near family. You know there’s always a possibility of the service member leaving at the drop of a phone call. Alerts are a way of life. Training accidents happen. Combat fatalities happen. Usually, though, the life has a rhythm. Hurricane Michael destroyed that rhythm for the families and personnel at Tyndall. My heart goes out to them, and to all their civilian neighbors.