Severe weather part of military life

TIJERAS — Last month, my husband and I drove from New Mexico to Louisiana. We left our house in a freak snowstorm — crazy weather for mid-May — and drove through every kind of weather known to humankind over the next few days.

On a weather app, we could see real-time radar. So we changed our course slightly to time our travel to follow behind the bulk of the storms.

Although we didn’t have perfect weather, we missed the tornadoes and large hailstorms as we visited Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

A few days ago, I was alerted to tornado warnings at Kirtland Air Force Base. I was on Facebook at the time, and soon my local groups were buzzing about possible tornado activity in Albuquerque.

Many couldn’t believe that we can have tornadoes here. People who had transferred to Kirtland from “tornado alley” were giving advice to those who were unsure what to do. One military spouse typed, “Ask me about earthquakes. I’ll tell you how to survive those.”

You know that saying, “If you don’t like it, just move?”

Well, we military families have that luxury. If we don’t like the weather, we can move. Maybe not right away, but rest assured, within a year or two or so, we will be living in some other weather climate.

Call it a blessing or a curse. My mobile lifestyle has taught me a little bit about self-reliance after Mother Nature has done her best to smack us down and subdue us.

We have lived in tornado, fire, and flood zones, and hurricane impact areas.

Where I live in New Mexico, thankfully, we don’t have much severe weather (although this year has been a little bizarre) but we do have fire season — oh, and wind-and the occasional 18-inch snow storm — and a new-to-me-thing “bomb cyclones.” But, for the most part, the weather here in my neck of the woods is pretty good.

Climate change debates aside, there are a lot of people looking at these weather patterns saying, “I don’t remember this when I was a kid” or “this seems to be a growing trend, we better look at it.”

A couple of years ago, our museum hosted a program by the Union of Concerned Scientists, who were commissioned to do a study looking at changing climate patterns on military installations. Just like cities everywhere, military bases are also vulnerable to catastrophic weather. We have the report in our special collections library.

The report has an ominous title: “The US Military on the Front Lines of Rising Seas: Growing Exposure to Coastal Flooding at Eastern Gulf Coast Military Bases.”

The report suggested that a roughly three-foot increase in sea level will threaten 128 coastal Department of Defense installations in the United States. And, even though this will happen gradually over time, it is recommended that military leaders take into consideration rising sea levels when planning new construction projects or operations.

So, while we military families continue to learn new ways to plan for and cope with weather-related disasters, and knowing that while we can leave one extreme-weather site, we still have a 50-50 chance of ending up in another.

Circe Olson Woessner is director of the Museum of the American Military Family in Tijeras. Contact her at:

[email protected]