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FIELD JOURNAL
Hurricane Floyd Visits FloridaBy: Brandt SecoshSeptember 13, 1999 Monday, September 13th began a pretty crazy week for Kennedy Space Center. Hurricane Floyd was bearing down on Florida, with Kennedy Space Center as one of its potential targets for landfall. By 9:00 a.m. many of the HURCON plans for all of the workers were placed into effect. All of the offices on the bottom floor of the Headquarters building where I work began following the outlined steps in the hurricane plan. Those steps included securing equipment, making backups of computer files, sandbagging entrances and re-enforcing windows with plywood. Hurricane Floyd is a massive category IV hurricane. The main elements of the hurricane that threaten Kennedy Space Center are the winds, which are measured at 155 mph, and the storm surge, which could be as high as twenty feet. This would place my office completely underwater reaching the bottom of the second floor in the Headquarters building. There is much to lose if a storm hits Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Station right next door. A rocket can cost anywhere from $55 million to $340 million. Each orbiter costs approximately $2 billion. All four of NASA's $2 billion orbiters are in the Orbiter Processing Facilities (OPF) and/or the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB). The OPF is designed to withstand winds up to 105 mph, and the VAB can withstand up to 125 mph. A multi-million dollar radar mapper to be launched in November was stored within a specially designed cargo canister inside a payload processing building built to withstand winds up to 110 mph. A U. S. laboratory and other parts of NASA's International Space Station were secured in the same building. Gear for a Hubble Space Telescope repair mission in late October was covered up in a spacecraft processing center built to withstand winds of 125 mph. Four rockets were secured at their launch pads at Cape Canaveral Air Station (CCAS) and protective service towers have been placed were around them. The towers are built to withstand winds up to 120 mph. At 3:30 P.M. Eastern Time, all workers were released to go and prepare their homes for Hurricane Floyd and standby for evacuation orders. I arrived at my home around 4:00 and began placing plywood on all the windows. After talking with my wife, Stephanie, we decided to stay and ride it out. My parents had called and said they were going to Alabama, my brother went to Ocala, one of my sisters went to Kissimmee, and my other sister was preparing to go to west Orlando. After preparing our home, we began helping our neighbors board up and prepare for Floyd. Many of our neighbors are elderly and were very appreciative for the help! |
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