A little while ago, CNN had a reporter at the Grand Bahama airport showing damage from hurricane Dorian. The terminal appeared to have been virtually cleaned out; the external walls seemed to still be there, the ceiling and roof were still there, but the windows were blown out and all the internal structures and furnishings appeared to have been utterly blown out. it looked like a warehouse with a bit of rubbish scattered about.
This is of course bad, but the “journalist” desribing the situation decided thatn hyperbole was the order of the day: he claimed that the *airport* was destroyed and that aircraft would not be able to get in to provide relief, and that they’d have to rely on ships and such.
Ummm… I’m *pretty* sure that the US Marines would look at an airport with a trashed terminal and non-blown-up runways as a virtual paradise for cargo helicopters. I’m *pretty* sure that C-130’s would be able to land and take off from those runways with no trouble whatsoever. Maybe it would be nice if the Marines could get some V-22’s to drop off some combat engineers to, I dunno, run a sweeper over the runways to get sharp pointy bits of metal off the runway, but once that’s done, the C-130’s and C-17’s should be able to land just fine. Planes like those, *pilots* like those, don’t need terminals or towers. Jut a few hundred feet of concrete.
I suppose it’s possible that the runways themselves *are* trashed. Strong enough winds can rip up surfaces; tornadoes have from time to time been known to rip asphalt roads from the ground and send slabs flying. But tornadoes are a different order of wind speed than hurricanes; it’ll take more than sustained hurricane force winds to yoink slabs of concrete a foot or more thick out of the ground.
