"You can never go home again," or so it's said. Well, you CAN go home... just don't expect it to look the same as when you left. I've mentioned Fortuna AFS, North Dakota several times in these pages (one such mention here)... a place I was stationed for one year, three days, eight hours and ten minutes. Not that we were counting, or anything. But we digress. Great good friend and partner-in-crime (I mean that last quite literally) Lori from the Fortuna days gave us a link to a sad and comprehensive photo essay on what remains of Fortuna AFS today. A couple o' pics from that essay follow.
You can see Part One of "Fortuna Air Force Station" here, Part II is here. I was a radar guy for 16 years of my 22-year USAF career and nearly ALL of the sites I was stationed at are either gone or will be soon. It's kinda-sorta like bein' a Squid and seein' yer former home turned into an artificial reef or cut up to make razor blades. Mebbe worse, I dunno.
* "The system suffered frequent bearing problems as the antenna weighed seventy tons." That's from a brief article on the FPS-35, with some interesting pics. I managed to get through MY year at Fortuna without antenna bearing problems. I had problems of a different sort, like working on the antenna deck in the winter, when ambient... NOT wind-chill... temps fell to ten or 20 degrees below zero. That was more "fun" than one is supposed to have.
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| Then, c. 1977. I was there in '77 and worked on that big-ass checkerboard antenna*. |
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| Now, c. 2013. |
You can see Part One of "Fortuna Air Force Station" here, Part II is here. I was a radar guy for 16 years of my 22-year USAF career and nearly ALL of the sites I was stationed at are either gone or will be soon. It's kinda-sorta like bein' a Squid and seein' yer former home turned into an artificial reef or cut up to make razor blades. Mebbe worse, I dunno.
* "The system suffered frequent bearing problems as the antenna weighed seventy tons." That's from a brief article on the FPS-35, with some interesting pics. I managed to get through MY year at Fortuna without antenna bearing problems. I had problems of a different sort, like working on the antenna deck in the winter, when ambient... NOT wind-chill... temps fell to ten or 20 degrees below zero. That was more "fun" than one is supposed to have.
It is kind of amazing that your old stompin' grounds are now a ghost town. Mother Nature certainly has a way of reclaiming her earth.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it made me pretty sad to see those pics.
DeleteReminds me of all the abandoned concrete WW II flack towers that abound in the countryside near abandoned WW II airstrips in East Anglia--can hardly drive down any country road (especially near the coast) w.o. seeing one slowly crumbling..
ReplyDeleteYou see those old flak towers all over Europe... or at least you used to.
DeletePS: Sent you a reply e-mail yesterday--yahoo said it went thru--did you get it, Buck?
ReplyDeleteNope. I checked my spam folder, too... nothing there. buckpennington01 (at) gmail (dot) com.
Deletethat would be "zero-one"
DeleteWe are olde. Every ship and mobile unit I was ever assigned to is gone. I have however, seen the opposite such as my last trip to South West Asia. When I went there first you could throw a rock across our little base. Now the base stretches for hundreds of yards in all directions and is covered with ground stations and enormous headquarters buildings.
ReplyDeleteI hear ya about olde, Curtis. OTOH, about half of the places I was assigned are still intact: Vandenberg, Keesler, Yokota, and Tinker. But Wakkanai AS, Japan; Sinop CDI, Turkey; North Bend AFS, OR; Keno AFS, OR; Boron AFS, CA; and the above-mentioned Fortuna AFS are all memories.
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