Tyndall Air Force Base Monitors 2019 Hurricane Season, While Recovering From Direct Hit in 2018

PANAMA CITY, FL. – Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida, is where Air Forces Northern coordinates hurricane response. In 2018, the base took a direct hit from Hurricane Michael.

"It was like being on another continent, it was like being on another planet, like a war-zone. It looked like a bomb had gone off," Lt Col. Camille Chigi, Chief of Operations Training for AF North, told CBN News.

"AF North is the air component to Northern command which is here in the continental United States and one of our missions, our number one mission is homeland defense, defending the homeland. Inside that umbrella of defending the homeland is a mission called DSCA-which is Defense Support to Civil Authorities," Chigi explained.

When a state experiences a natural disaster it's not equipped to handle, officials can request help from the Department of Defense. AF North, at Tyndall, is then tasked with providing that help through air support. 

Recently, that mission has been hurricane response.

Lt Col. Chigi heads up a team of experts who monitor natural disasters and prepare to be called in to provide support. In October of 2018, she was caught completely off guard.

"When Michael was a tropical depression it was a Saturday and we were home...my toddler, who was not quite two and my 14-year-old daughter were both sleeping and my husband and I were enjoying a rare quiet moment in our house and he had been complaining of a stomach ache," Chigi recalls.

She was seven months pregnant and dismissed her husband's complaints at first, but then he got worse.

After rushing him to the emergency room, she found out he'd ruptured his intestine and would need to stay in the hospital for seven days. It was only two days later that Michael intensified. 

"Somewhere Monday afternoon-evening we got the evacuation order from Tyndall that said 'you must be gone by Tuesday.' I think it was noon was the time we needed to be gone by," Chigi said.

Tuesday morning she was forced to evacuate with her two children. Michael was already a strong category four hurricane and she had to leave her husband in a hospital built to withstand a category three. 

"That was probably the hardest family decision I've ever made and I hope to not have to make a decision like that ever again," Chigi said.

A team at an alternate location took over the job of monitoring Michael and preparing to provide support if needed and a small hurricane ride-out team stayed behind on Tyndall. Master SGT. Brandon Danford was a part of it.

"The building we were in is rated to a certain category storm and all predictions were the storm would be a cat 3 and the storm was a cat 5...the damage and the wall movement and ceiling tiles blowing around, insulation everywhere, the sheer destruction of the storm. Just chaos and fear," Danford told CBN of his experience on Tyndall during the worst of Hurricane Michael.

When the storm passed Danford and his men got to work repairing fuel lines to generators, tarping damaged roofs and doing what they could to get at least parts of the base mission ready.

Only 72 days after the storm, Air Forces Northern was already 100 percent missions operational again.

As for Lt. Col Chigi and her husband, he was able to be evacuated to a hospital in Pensacola after the storm and has since fully recovered, and Chigi is back at Tyndall. As the rest of the base continues to rebuild what the Air Force says will be the "base of the future," Chigi and her team are ready for whatever this hurricane season has in store.