“We knew we were going to get it but we didn’t think it would be this bad.” “When you start seeing all of this it affects you to a point where you can’t really believe it,” Watkins said. Several cars around the base were on fire due to salt water covering their electrical systems, he recalled. Only half of the base commissary building was visible through seven feet of water that now covered parts of Keesler. At first I was thinking ‘we got this,’ but when you start driving through high waters it becomes real scary.”Īs Watkins and the chief braved the storm in over 100 mph winds, their slow trek to bring the base’s water back online looked like a scene from a horror movie. “We were sitting in a dominator, which sits off the ground about 10 feet. “Myself and a chief master sergeant in my shop went out and started switching the power over to bring the water wells back up,” he said. With only one well on an automatic transfer to generator power and flood waters at six feet and rising, something needed to be done. The pressure for Keesler’s water wells was dropping dangerously low. “The only way that we can be here is if we have sustainable clean water.” “The commander at the time said that he couldn’t let us go out into the storm, but I told him that if we lose water we are done,” stressed Al Watkins, the then 81 st CES utilities manager. That was the last time he would see his home and the iconic Gulf Coast shoreline as he originally knew it as he drove to safety. It was as if you could tell something was coming. “It was really eerie driving down Highway 90,” he recalls. The Gulf Coast, usually teeming with activity, was a ghost town by the time Stack was able to leave. “The majority of the evacuees in the local area had already driven out, so surprisingly the roads were empty when I left at about 4:30 on Sunday afternoon.” “I was one of the last six people in the building getting the last plane evacuated,” he said. That same morning, Stack, now suffering from a sinus infection was unable to leave with the planes so he stayed behind to help the rest of the squadron evacuate in preparation for the storm. On August 28, Katrina reached Category 5 status with wind speeds of up to 175 miles per hour. “Honestly at that point it wasn’t super intense, it wasn’t really a memorable storm.”Ĭontrary to what the crew believed, the storm continued to intensify causing the Hurricane Hunters and remaining aircraft to evacuate from Keesler. “My last flight into Katrina was when it was a Category 3 as it was hitting the Gulf ,” he said. He describes the event as just an ‘ordinary’ flight into a hurricane with turbulence and lighting flashing around the plane. Stack would get one final bird’s eye view of the storm before it made landfall. I was like, I guess this thing did build up a little bit-we had no idea that it was going to go across Florida and become the Category 5 monster that it was.” Lauderdale as the eye was coming over that area, it was kind of neat. “I actually was on the flight that got it named,” he said. ![]() It didn’t look like much.”Īlmost as if trying to prove something to the Hurricane Hunters, the storm began to strengthen. “We had flown it like two or three days in a row as it was slowly moving north to north west. “The first time I flew Katrina was before it was named,” Stack recalls. During those first few days the storm didn’t appear to be anything substantial. The 53 rd WRS, also known as the Hurricane Hunters, circled above in their WC-130J as warm ocean water, low level moisture and light winds converged over the Atlantic to create the tropical disturbance that would become Hurricane Katrina. Jeff Stack, a loadmaster with the 53 rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, and countless other Gulf Coast residents found themselves in after the storm made landfall Aug. Biloxi Mississippi, home of Keesler Air Force Base, was truly Hell on Earth directly following Hurricane Katrina-the costliest and one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. ![]() The repulsive smell of rotten bananas and dead chickens cuts through the stifling summer air from a destroyed ship yard. Memories, now garbage and debris, cover the earth as far as the eye can see in all directions. A lone figure stands in the midst of scattered remnants of what was once a family’s home.
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