Eight Feet Deep

The WC-130 air­craft looked fright­en­ingly huge as it ascended over the waters of the Mis­sis­sippi Sound. How could some­thing that large, fly­ing at what appeared to be such a grad­ual pace, make it off the Keesler Air Force Base run­way and over the beach high­way in Biloxi with­out falling out of the sky, I used to ask myself?

They seem too big and slow to fly but they do and those of us on the Gulf Coast are grate­ful that they do.

I never really thought that much about what the planes were doing or where they were going. Nor did the fact that I only saw these planes fly so lan­guidly when I hung out on a hot sum­mer day with my friends pro­vide a clue as to the air­crafts’ missions.

It was an Air Force-looking plane and it took off from Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. I was a 19-year-old sailor sta­tioned with the Seabees some 10 miles away in Gulf­port. Since the planes were fly­ing from an Air Force base, I fig­ured they were up to Air Force things.

I knew, back then, that a lot of dif­fer­ent activ­ity went on at Keesler. I got my first pair of glasses — black, horn-rimmed ones which sev­eral later would look cool if you went for the Elvis Costello look – at Keesler because the dis­pen­sary at the Seabee base didn’t have an opthamol­o­gist or even an optometrist.

My home­boy, Jonathan, who lived with his first wife and then-baby girl over in Biloxi, attended air traf­fic con­trol school at Keesler dur­ing a hitch in the Air Force. After I got back from Sea duty, one of my office sub­or­di­nates on the ship trans­ferred to Keesler to attend Chaplain’s Assis­tant school even though he was in the Navy.

But only years later would I fig­ure out that those huge, slow planes that I saw at some time dur­ing sum­mers on the Mis­sis­sippi Gulf Coast beach were so impor­tant to my life when I decided to be a p’ert-near coast resident.

Those planes I saw, but didn’t know or par­tic­u­larly care what they were for back then, were Hur­ri­cane Hunters.

The 53rd Weather Recon­nais­sance Squadron at Keesler fly the WC-130s, or Lock­heed Mar­tin WC-130J Her­cules if you want to get tech­ni­cally anal about it, into trop­i­cal sys­tems to detect vital infor­ma­tion which helps hur­ri­cane fore­cast­ers deter­mine what a storm might do and where it might go. Often the Air Force Reserve crews man­ning the air­craft will fly right into the eye of a hur­ri­cane. You might think “calm” when talk­ing about the eye until you remem­ber you have the hur­ri­cane sur­round­ing you.

This is one of those days, today, you might see one of these big slow planes take off and ever so slowly climb up into the sky over the Mis­sis­sippi Sound and its bar­rier islands. A National Hur­ri­cane Cen­ter advi­sory around noon Cen­tral Day­light Time indi­cated an Air Force recon­nais­sance plane was approach­ing a low pres­sure cen­ter between Grand Cay­man and Hon­duras. The NHC has given the sys­tem an 80 per­cent chance for trop­i­cal cyclone development.

Of course, the cable news media is all over the pos­si­bil­ity of a storm like a gecko on an insur­ance com­mer­cial. That is because of the mas­sive BP oil spill that con­tin­ues to pour into the Gulf of Mex­ico and onto land from Louisiana to Florida.

My most not-favorite CNN anchor, Rick Sanchez, was mak­ing much ado about this not-even-tropical depres­sion and the hur­ri­cane “mod­els” which are already pre­dict­ing paths for what could become the first named storm of the sea­son. If it be comes a trop­i­cal storm it would be named Alex. The weather woman on CNN is at this moment as I write this say­ing which model would be “prefer­able” as for where the storm may go. She means what would be the best track for the storm, if there is a storm, as it might affect the oil spill and limit sub­se­quent dam­age, if there is dam­age and if there is a storm. That is truly putting the dog before the pony show. The rea­son is that the mod­els of where this storm might head cur­rently extend from Tampico, Mex­ico, to Apalachicola, Florida. That’s a lot of ground, uh, water to cover and it includes the area in which I live.

In just the last five years I have been through three hur­ri­canes, a trop­i­cal storm and four or five evac­u­a­tions, if you count all those folks who came to this area from Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina until being chased away by Hur­ri­cane Rita. If I left out a storm, I apologize.

Don’t get me wrong. I am con­cerned about the BP gusher as I have been for awhile and not just for the oil-covered pel­i­cans although I hate to see the envi­ron­ment f**ked up. But I am like­wise con­cerned for my neigh­bors here on the Upper Texas Coast. That is why I am glad those building-sized, puz­zling slow Air Force-looking planes I used to see when I was a young sailor are out there fly­ing with con­fi­dence in the Gulf of Mex­ico hunt­ing hur­ri­canes. The infor­ma­tion that those air­men out of Keesler gather is impor­tant to a lot of peo­ple and prob­a­bly more folks than usual — because of the BP spill in the Gulf — await what comes from the storms that the Hur­ri­cane Hunters risk their lives to investigate.

Here is another look from AccuWeather about pos­si­ble Alex paths.