Deja Vue

The island of Cedar Key, Florida has been in the news lately due to it being in the path of Hurricane Helene. This brings up some memories for me. I was stationed at Cedar Key in 1972. We had a small radar site there. I don’t use the word “literally” much but as you can see from the video, we were literally on the Gulf of Mexico. On June 18, I had duty from 7 PM to 7 AM the following morning. Hurricane Agnes was moving in and I had to report to HQ every hour on how high the water was rising. I was very happy to be relieved so I could return to my quarters and get some sleep. But that was not going to happen. I was awoken after about an hour and was told that everyone needed to report to the site. We were instructed to “tear down” the site and move it to higher ground. To put this in perspective, crews were usually given a week to get a site dismantled. We had hours. It was quite an experience doing this in the storm but we succeeded. We did it in about 10-12 hours. The next few days we assisted with cleanup. If you’ve read this far, thank you for allowing me to share this.

tony.casamento.org/det35.mp4